In a sign that veganism is making its way into the American mainstream, Disney announced Tuesday that plant-based food options will be added to every dining location in their US theme parks.
Now, it’s the happiest place on earth.
Multi-National Corporations
‘SODEXO BRINGS ECO-FRIENDLY VEGAN MEALS TO 5,000 CAFETERIAS WORLDWIDE’ ∞
“When you see there are more than 20,000 known edible plants on our planet, and yet our food comes primarily from a dozen of them, there is definitely opportunity to change and discover new ways of eating,” John Wright, senior vice president, Sodexo Food Platform, said. “Today, we are helping consumers as they look for ways to adopt more sustainable diets. Future 50 Foods represents an exciting opportunity for our chefs to innovate in the kitchen and share Sodexo’s Love of Food (campaign) with diners in a way that’s also good for the planet.” Last year, Sodexo launched 200 new plant-based dishes at hundreds of corporate, university, and healthcare cafeterias nationwide.
This is a big move by Sodexo. They are the world’s largest food vendor and serve 13,000 sites with over 100 million people eating meals with them each day. Honestly though, the thing that I found incredible was the part about the 20,000 known edible plants.
It makes sense that there are that many plants to eat, but I’m just not sure I’d ever seen that figure. Now I’m wondering how many I’ve tried, or if I’m in the double-digits percentage-wise.
That’s the sort of number I like to see when I think of what it’d be like to eat at Noma or Vespertine. I hope they open my world up by introducing me to vegetables that I’ve not only never tasted, but maybe never even seen or possibly even heard of.
‘Where’s the fake beef? Not at Kraft Heinz, investors worry’ ∞
Investors are chewing out Kraft Heinz Co (KHC.O) for failing to lay out a full strategy for how it plans to compete in the roughly $3 billion-a-year plant-based protein market.
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Products by rivals Beyond Meat Inc (BYND.O) and Impossible Foods have become the hottest food trend in recent years, gaining popularity among mainstream consumers looking to cut back on meat consumption.
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Kraft Heinz has been ranked one of the least proactive major food makers in the plant-based protein market, according to FAIRR, a major investor coalition that includes several Kraft Heinz shareholders. The company’s main meat-alternative brand, 40-year-old BOCA Burger, has lost market share since 2013.
“Any company ranking at the bottom clearly has some catching up to do,” said Peter van der Werf, head of responsible investment management at Robeco
This almost made my brain melt. Five years ago, this would have been a headline from The Onion.
‘Kroger To Launch Plant-Based Protein Section In Meat Aisle’ ∞
Maria Chiorando for Plant Based News:
US supermarket giant Kroger is trialing a plant-based protein section in the meat aisles of selected stores.
The trial, which will run for 20 weeks, will take place in 60 locations across Indiana, Illinois, and Denver this fall.
The timing for this is impeccable and I assume intentional: Impossible foods (aka the makers of the Impossible burger) will be available in stores this month.
The placement of these products in stores is interesting too. Ethan Brown, the CEO of Beyond Meat, has always wanted his products to be placed in the meat aisle. When the Beyond products were in the vegan and vegetarian section, he called that the “penalty box” in his Wired interview from 2013.
I wonder if Kroger will continue to keep a vegan/vegetarian freezer section if this goes well. I’d assume so, but it’d be interesting to see what more integration would do generally. Making vegan products more visible will naturally make these products more popular. Like end aisle caps and special displays, this could be a big moment for vegan foods as they move into flexitarians life.
Kroger is the USA’s largest supermarket chain, and is the third-largest retail company in the world behind Wal-Mart and Costco. This could drastically change the business of lots of plant-based companies.
Herbs and Spices ∞
Vegan Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton is expanding 14 new locations of Neat Burger over the next two years. In the write-up on Bloomberg, this part got me thinking.
Neat Burger will feature Beyond Meat Inc.’s vegetable-based burgers, mixed with its own herbs and ingredients.
That little bit made me realize how little I see restaurants playing with their Beyond and Impossible burgers by adding herbs and spices. I hope we see more of that.
It’d be nice to have a more unique experience at restaurants with the uniformity offered by Beyond and Impossible moving globally. Even at larger chains, it’d be nice to see a distinction between how Carl’s Jr. and A&W prepare their Beyond Burger.
Why Does It Look and Taste Like Meat ∞
Ethan Brown being interviewed by Nilay Patel (in bold):
You are describing how to replace meat. Making it so that your expectations of cooking and eating a Beyond Meat Burger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty. Is that the right goal? Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past or is it we have to change our food supply?
My mother asks me that question a lot. She’s like “Why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don’t you just build a new source of protein for the front of the plate that people get really excited about?” I think we ought to earn that right. We have to prove that we can do this because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. You know most of us do. Around 94 percent of the population here in United States. And so that’s a really clear target for me.
I often have conversations with non-vegans who ask why vegan products try to replicate non-vegan foods. The short and simple is because that’s the easiest way to become part of people’s lives, in ways they’re already familiar and have a base-level expectation. Anything that’s around 1:1 for replacing parts of a recipe is the ideal product for most of America.
It’s hard enough to get people to try a slight variation in something they’re already familiar with. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to get most of America to purchase a new protein that they’ve never heard of before.
Beyond is doing the right thing.
‘The Fake Backlash to Fake Meat’ ∞
From Alex Trembath at OneZero:
I can’t help but notice that when fake meat was the purview of food utopians and visionary chefs, thought leaders were enthusiastically in favor of it. But as soon as fake meat hit the plastic trays at Burger King, they were fretting about how over-processed it was.
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I believe that the problem with fake meat isn’t so much that it is ultra-processed as that it is mass produced. The conflation of exclusivity and goodness is actually endemic to large swaths of food culture. “Myths about superior taste and nutrition,” food scholar S. Margot Finn observed […], “mostly help the middle classes distance themselves from the poor.”
I think people also make a natural connection between exclusivity and quality because the journey to get to the place allows for better storytelling and a natural inclination to making that journey quote-unquote worth it.
In his book The Wizard and the Prophet, historian Charles Mann identifies the size and scale of a technological systems, not the technology itself, as the root of a certain kind of environmental opposition.
I understand this though. Look at Monsanto. It’s easy to not trust any food company who has that much skin in the game.
Obviously base classism doesn’t sell, and any food systems capable of feeding over seven billion people are going to be large-scale in some degree. That’s why critics of fake meat and other food reformers rely on vague epithets like “processed.” Food processing, after all, is a category so wide as to defy useful definition.
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Certainly, food products loaded with excess sugar, sodium, preservatives, saturated fat, and exotic ingredients could more easily be labelled “ultra-processed” than foods that contain, well, lower portions of those ingredients. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s not clear to me, nor, seemingly, anyone else, where to draw the line between unprocessed and processed foods.
I do think we need to have a conversation about “processed” foods, but we need a spectrum to help us understand it’s relation as a net-positive or net-negative from the standard that it’s (often) replacing.
And the choice, ultimately, isn’t between large-scale mass-produced and small-scale non-mass-produced. It is between mass production that is more sustainable, healthier, and more humane — and mass production that is less so.
Bingo.
But when we find fault with a clearly beneficial innovation slotting neatly into modern food systems, perhaps the problem isn’t with the system, but with our own idealized vision for what an equitable, healthy, appealing food system should look like. Surely there are excesses and failures with the status quo, in the arenas of nutrition, corporate governance, worker rights, treatment of animals, and more. But while we work to actively address those issues, we might consider whether the systems we have designed over generations to feed billions of humans aren’t doing a relatively good job at that task already. After all, global hunger and undernourishment have been trending downward for decades, an achievement we should surely take into account.
Morningstar Farms is going full vegan soon and it can’t wait to tell everyone ∞
Roughly 50% of its portfolio of products have already made the switch to full vegan, and that should increase to about 65% by the end of 2019 and come 2021 all Morningstar Farms foods will be completely plant-based.
This is a Hallelujah moment for everyone who lives in small towns with access to only one grocery store.
‘Miyoko Schinner, the Premier Pioneer of Plant-Based Cheese’ ∞
From Gabe Kleinman on Miyoko Schinner:
“We want to be the leader in this space. We’re not just selling cheese — we’re revolutionizing dairy with plants. This will be the new norm in a matter of years, not decades.”
As we wrapped up, Miyoko made mention of misreported news that Miyoko’s Kitchen was being acquired by Nestlé. Some of her fiercest devotees were devastated and angry, taking to social media to protest. After quelling the protests, she reflected on the advantages of plant-based startups working with Big Food categorically. “Because of companies like Beyond Meat and Memphis Meats, Tyson [which invested in both] is now headed in a different direction.”
It’s easy to be upset that Miyokos Creamery would partner with Nestle, but the idea that Miyokos can be a nationwide product excites me. When I return home to my small town in the midwest, they don’t have all the products I do in Los Angeles. If this gets them in bigger chains across the globe, it’s a net positive.
Also, I love their cashew-based cheeses and can’t wait to try their new cheeses made of beans. The cost differential should be massive, and I’m betting they’ll be just as delicious.