Americans are quitting plant-based meat
Plant-based meat looked poised to change the world — but then Americans stopped buying it.
In 2020, retail sales of plant-based meat grew 45%, surpassing the $1 billion mark for the first time. Increasing awareness of companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, in addition to climate change and animal welfare concerns, nudged many Americans to give fake meat a shot.
The nature of the pandemic helped sales as well. Many consumers were facing meat shortages, had extra cash to spend, and were looking for something new to break up the day-to-day monotony.
But things have changed over the past year.
As of December, supermarket sales of refrigerated plant-based meat had fallen 14% vs. the prior year, according to the retail data company IRI. Orders of plant-based burgers at food service outlets were down 9% in November compared to 2019 levels.
The slowdown is among the reasons Beyond Meat — whose stock price has fallen nearly 75% in the last year — laid off 20% of its workforce in 2022. And after letting go of 6% of its employees last October, Impossible Foods is reportedly planning to shrink its headcount by an additional 20%.
If inflation was the only reason for the industry’s struggles, there’d be less cause for concern. Plant-based meat is still two- to four-times as expensive as traditional meat, according to the Good Food Institute, so it’s possible many fake meat fans have simply cut back temporarily to save money.
Jacob Zinkula / Business Insider
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