Your favorite social media marketing event is headed to NYC this May 12–14! Register for Social Media Week before December 16 to lock in early-bird rates and save 50% on your pass.
Beyond Meat, once the darling of the alternative protein category, reported an 18% decline in revenue for 2023, despite heavily discounting prices in the U.S. This sobering downward revenue spiral for Beyond has continued in 2024, a stark contrast to the heyday of astronomical valuations in the plant-based meat industry just a few short years ago.
Now, everyone has an opinion on how alternative protein brands should be marketing (or not) in this time of turmoil—from the recent well-publicized rebrand by Impossible to Beyond’s focus on healthier ingredients with American Heart Association endorsements.
As smaller brands run out of funding, marketing experts like Scott Galloway are advising companies to cut prices and staffing while eschewing brand building altogether. Some media outlets have written off the entire alternate protein category as unviable, while big meat and dairy continue to denigrate us as “ultra-processed foods.”
In an increasingly divided America, alternate proteins seem on the brink of becoming yet another hot political issue. The bottom line: We are at a critical juncture in this space. Brands in the alternative protein category need to take a step back and reassess whether the industry’s current approach can lead to success—or risks turning consumers away altogether.
Shifting 11,000 years of consumer behavior
Expecting consumer behavior to change overnight in food, barring a COVID-like disruption, simply isn’t realistic. For 11,000 years, we’ve consumed the same handful of plants and animals (12 crops and five animals for 75% of our calories, to be precise). Humans truly are creatures of habit when it comes to what we eat.
But smart marketing and creativity can help shift consumer and social norms. In fact, with deference to Galloway, I believe that we don’t need to cut back on marketing—we need to get better at it, especially the consumer insights and 4 P’s.
Product
We’ve forgotten that the 4 P’s include the product, a pretty important driver in food. Marketing for food and beverage has evolved a lot, but one thing hasn’t changed: taste. Much has been written about how alternative proteins have fallen short in this department and, yes, the industry must deliver better-tasting products that consumers want to buy repeatedly. Food has been and always will be highly emotional, not rational, and it’s going to be hard to change how people eat without using creative brand-building.
But the question of “does it need to taste exactly like the animal version (or bleed like it) to be preferred?” is a good one to reconsider. Plant-based milk’s success suggests otherwise, having grown to almost 15% of milk sales today. No one thinks soy, almond, or oat milk is identical to cow’s milk, but they fill a functional and emotional need for a growing segment of consumers. And I would bet that most of us have both dairy and non-dairy milks in our refrigerators today because they meet different occasions or needs for different members of the family. Think of it as “yes, and?”
Promotion
A well-crafted campaign built on deep consumer insights can change behavior and culture. One of my favorite examples is the Always #LikeAGirl campaign I worked on at Leo Burnett. By finding a deep consumer insight that we leveraged creatively, we changed the meaning of doing something “Like a Girl” from an insult to a compliment.
It built the brand’s equity, grew sales and share, and changed culture globally. Similarly, leveraging deep consumer understanding to find communities that share our purpose and goal can also be a smart way to create a social movement in alternative proteins.
Pricing
Providing value for the consumer is another basic expectation that we must deliver on to succeed, and pricing is an important piece of that. Especially in CPG, when we cede this important P of marketing to other functions, we fail. The current pricing for alternative proteins makes them largely inaccessible to a significant portion of the population, especially younger consumers who are key to the future of the category.
Place
Thinking more strategically about distribution for a new category like alternative proteins is also essential. Simply adding retail doors without considering consumer traction has been the kiss of death for some brands in this space.
Believing that if we place it on the shelf, they will come and buy is an unrealistic strategy given that most startups cannot afford to support all those retailer doors with the significant promotional dollars needed to drive awareness and trial. A more disciplined approach that proves out velocities at the right retailers is critical to success before expanding broadly to more conventional retailers.
The most vital ingredient is consumer trust
Pretending alternative proteins are meat or dairy when they aren’t simply doesn’t persuade anyone and is disrespectful to consumers because it assumes we can fool them. As a newer player in this space, we at Nature’s Fynd have chosen to call our foods what they are: fungi-powered. Not plants, not animals. Yes, it’s risky, but it’s also truthful.
Most consumers are appreciative of this kind of transparency and, as a result, are more open. Trust is essential to brand building.
At the end of the day, for those consumers who want a steak or cheese pizza, we probably can’t meet that exact need. However, we all should want alternative proteins to succeed because we need new solutions that will help us feed ourselves and future generations more sustainably in the face of climate change and our growing population. Hopefully, we can all be on the same side of that issue. But we need better marketing to help drive that change.
