Leonardo DiCaprio the actor and Bill Gates the founder of Microsoft both back a company called Beyond Meat. Beyond Meat is probably the most successful company on the planet right now. It is the first alternative meat start-up to go public. The shares are trading at $80.34 and the company was floated at $25 per share on May 2. These guys are making pot loads of money. It’s worth $4.6 billion at the time of this article.
The other alternative meat company which dominates the market in America is Impossible Foods. This company is valued at $2 billion. It is backed by the singer, Katy Perry and Serena Williams the tennis champion. Plant-based vegan meat is the “it” market at the moment. It’s not going to go away. It is not a fad. It will grow more than tenfold to US$140 billion over the next 10 years according to analysts at Barclays. By 2029, alternative meat made from plant proteins will account for 10% of the 1.4 trillion-a-year global meat market.
Veganism is becoming increasingly popular in parallel with concerns over the environment. There has been an awful lot spoken about the environment which has been poisoned by human population growth and activity. Global warming is a constant conversational topic. Electric vehicles are a major topic as well nowadays. They are all part and parcel of the same subject which is about protecting the planet because the experts, and these experts should be believed, are genuinely concerned about the future of the planet and they are not looking that far into the future; perhaps about a hundred years.
So our children and their children are going to feel the effects are what is happening now. People are far more concerned which will drive the market.
“With consumers becoming increasingly aware of the environmental, animal welfare and health and wellness impacts from the consumption of traditional meat, we believe there is enough evidence indicating that alternative meats are not merely a fad.”
Analysts at Barclays
It is difficult to replicate a steak but it is much easier to replicate sausages and hamburgers with plant-based vegan meat.
Pret A Manger are in discussions about buying a business called Eat, a rival sandwich chain, which they intend to use as outlets for vegan versions of their products. They want to buy the business for £60 million. It’s all change and businesses are becoming much more sensitive to environmental issues.
This is excellent news. The problem is it will take a long time for this attitude to filter through to places like Asian where, quite frankly, they are less enlightened about environmental issues. They are still destroying virgin forests at an enormous rate. Today, I voted in the European Union elections. An enormous amount of paper was employed to present the candidates. I ticked the relevant box and was angry that presumably many thousands of trees had been cut down in order to run this election which should never have happened.
It is probable that the paper came from Asia where they chop down virgin forests to pulp for the manufacture of paper. The paper that I used today was not recycled as far as I can tell. This government is not concerned enough about environmental issues but businesses are.
