Environmentalism, food startups, plant-based lifestyle, and a pandemic shaping our world for the better
Building your plant-based story Part I
This article is the first instalment of a series I call “Building your plant-based story” where I cover different aspects of the vegan, kind and plant-based ecosystem and give guidance on how business owners could navigate that space.
Let’s start with storytime! One of the most productive times of my career was to be a project researcher and developer at a firm that had a high success rate in accessing European funding. As a project developer, my creative work within the project was to tie together research and project activity, optimise the application form copy and steer the project partnership towards a higher chance to win over the assessors who make decisions about funding allocation. In practice, a project proposal - like a business case - had to be aligned with industry trends to unlock its innovative potential and beat the competition across the continent so that the project could access funding.
Learning to understand and skim trends that drive social and economic change at a local or regional level is crucial in business planning, and my goal with these articles is to lead you through a similar process.
In this article, I’ll recap what has been going on in the world lately shaping the plant-based industry. From before and after the coronavirus pandemic, let’s see how environmentally friendly thinking led people to favour a plant-based lifestyle over less sustainable ones.
Environmentalism, climate concerns, and the link with animal agriculture - featured in media worldwide.
Two years ago in 2018, The Guardian uncovered an in-depth study about the meat and dairy industry and published a headline that went viral: Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth. Since then, the links between agricultural farming, consumption of animal products, the use of land, greenhouse gas emission and losing the wildlife have been further investigated and solidified. The scientists behind the study also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.Following the trends, major production companies and media streaming giants like Netflix came out with content shedding light on the dark side of mass meat production: climate and health concerns. Cowspiracy and The Game Changers are my favourite documentaries to watch.
Beyond Meat went way beyond our expectations, as well as other food innovation startups.
If for some reason, you missed the above environmental news, I’m sure you did not miss the rising of the Beyond Meat success story. Listed as one of the world's most innovative companies since 2014, Beyond Meat landed its ready-to-cook burger patties on the grocery shop shelves in 2016, and from 2019, you can grab them in Hungary as well. But what is going on here? A plant-based meat substitute that looks, cooks, and tastes and “bleeds” like a beef burger. Founder Ethan Brown, born in a family keeping animals, quickly connected the dots: since cows, chickens, and pigs consume tremendous amounts of vegetation and drink a lot of water, and then use their biological systems to build muscle that we harvest as meat, they are only a middleman in this transaction. Any business school will tell you to identify and get rid of any unnecessary parts in your production: for Beyond Meat, the animal was that. Brown now engineers meat directly from plants, cutting out the middlemen, the animals, from the chain.
Since Beyond Meat, the plant-based food industry landscape multiplied itself in size, new startups popping up each week. And it’s not about Beyond Meat (or Impossible Foods, for that matter) alone anymore, plant-based food innovation is a segment that’s growing at lightspeed. Hopefully, I can get to dedicate an article to these companies sometime soon, until that, here are young plant-based food companies I find incredibly exciting, and their brand inspiring:
Willicroft, Amsterdam, NL with their plant-based cheese range,
Plantcraft, Budapest, HU and their animal-free deli meat, and
Fellow creatures, London, UK with their no-milk chocolate.
Coronavirus: another kick in animal farming’s ass.
Wet markets in China are proved to be the root cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re called a “wet market” because the blood and remains of slaughtered animals run together with melting ice to make the floors wet. I’m sorry for being this graphic here. It’s not the lack of hygiene that contributed to the pandemic; instead, it is thought that the stress of captivity and being brought to market weakens animals' immune systems, which in turn creates an environment where mutating viruses can slip from one species to another. When that happens, a new strain of a virus can occasionally get a foothold in humans. As Forbes wrote in its article Preventing Another Pandemic Might Be As Simple As Trying Alternative Meat, based on the evidence, the conditions of these markets and some large-scale farms increase the chances of a pandemic. It isn’t the act of eating meat that causes pandemics; it is the conditions in which we put animals in captivity and slaughter them that leads to disease. To solve this, undoubtedly, we need to advocate a systemic level change.
The flip side of COVID-19: alternative meat and plant-based food sales escalated.
I’m not sure that the news about wet markets made people eat less meat during the lockdowns, but the numbers came out, and it seems that many switched animal meat to alternatives. There indeed were halts in the food supply systems, and animal products are usually the first merchants cut to avoid financial loss. Meat and many of the dairy products have a shelf life limited to days, and this is not true to their plant-based alternatives. So people - intentionally or not - started eating more plant-based foods because it was accessible and safe to consume when the supply chain operations slowed down. The sales of environmentally and animal-friendly products escalated in supermarkets and grocery stores across the globe.
To give you a few examples:
Based on a report The Plant-Based Foods Association (PBFA) and SPINS, Vegconomist says plant-based food sales in the USA have accelerated twice as fast as animal meat sales during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an outstanding example, British plant-based baby food company Mamamade has reported a 300% spike in sales due to the pandemic. Founder Sophie Baron attributes the rise to an increase in home deliveries during the lockdown, as well as a desire from parents to ensure their children develop a taste for plant-based foods.
Award-winning Oumph!, a plant-based brand based in Sweden and known in the Nordic countries as well as in the UK, where the brand has seen an increase of 400% in sales for the period of January to April when compared to the same period last year. The brand also successfully launched into the Netherlands this year.
There’s a visible shift in consumer behaviour to more plant-friendly food alternatives, and that is expected to grow even more.
Whole food plant-based diet (WFBPD) becomes a convenience.
I did not plan to bring up a health movement in this article first, but, the thing is, that health-conscious trends have an enormous part in populating alternative ways of living and taking care of the planet. Own health is in the interest of every person, so when people start making healthy choices, it quickly can become a pretty big deal at a large scale.
There is one particular dietary trend that aligns not only with the climate change argument but with the animal welfare movement, and as far as science and practice tell us, it makes humans thriving (health-wise, at least!). A whole-food plant-based diet is when you build your calorie intake and nutrition on solely eating plants, focusing on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, seeds and nuts, which should make up the majority of what you eat.
I recently came across this research study published in the Environmental Research Letters. It found that eating a plant-based diet has three times more positive environmental impact than washing your clothes in cold water; four times more than recycling; and eight times more than upgrading light bulbs. Wow. I mean we know that individual actions are essential when it comes to climate change mitigation, but who would have thought a couple of years ago that such a simple thing as eating plants, can make such a change?
Around 2012, as it the WFPBD started to become known, there weren’t many resources you could turn to if you wanted to align your diet or lifestyle and switch from animal protein sources to plant-based protein sources. As in now, 2020, we have all the cookbooks, guides, and courses if we want to build this muscle of ours (pun intended) and guide our families towards a more sustainable future.
A few ways to get into a whole food plant-based diet:
If you need guidance, I highly recommend you to check out the guides of Nutriciously. Alena and Lars, a couple from Germany, produced a massive amount of knowledge, practical manuals and recipes that are an easy way to dive deep into a plant-based lifestyle.
If you’re led by your gut and want to start cooking asap, go for the Deliciously Ella app (iOS and Android). Several hundred recipes by today and counting, this app is a household staple for us if we need a quick inspiration.
If you’re interested in hearing more thoughts from me on this and you read Hungarian, check out the Adaptable Kitchen PDF that I wrote during the Spring 2020 lockdowns about using up all our pantry staples instead of going out to shop. I shared the principles we follow by our nutrition at home, as well as four 5-ingredient recipes.
Green appreciation, gardening, plant-enthusiasm, all things natural is still in the rise.
This is probably the topic my readers, you, can relate to the most. We’re a generation that is seeking out its ways to reconnect with nature regardless of our living environment. We are greening, growing and nurturing plants in our homes, on our balconies, in community gardens across the city. Some move out of the town and buy a piece of land. Some inherit a piece of land and start growing vegetables there. We use greenery as a therapy, to soothe and to ground us while creating living jungles of whatever we manage to keep alive. And I’m writing this as a proud mama of plenty home-grown avocado trees and a 3.5 metres high Strelitzia.In many people, plant enthusiasm is coupled with a concern for climate change activism or with a steady shift to eating more plants instead of consuming animal products. From what I see of the world, this return to our natural resources won’t go anywhere shortly. We’ll keep aligning to these trends and adopt lifestyle changes with less impact on Planet Earth. Speaking of Planet Earth... If you haven’t seen David Attenborough’s documentary called A Life On Our Planet, what are you doing? Go, go, watch!If you’re more like a book person, I read a remarkable memoir written by a British writer and fellow plant lady Alice Vincent called Rootbound - Rewilding a life and I think you’d enjoy it, too.
Whether you’re drawn to plant-based thinking from the environmental standpoint or animal welfare is what makes you re-think your lifestyle, or it is a mix of health-provoking choices and green appreciation, you rock, and I think you should know that. At Plantconfident, I stand by inclusivity and the idea that building a plant-based life and a plant-based business is moving on a spectrum. People have different drives and different motivations but what makes us a little bit ahead of our time is that we intentionally act for our future.
Summary
I believe the above trends and events draw a firm direction that’ll soon define a considerable part of the world economy, giving opportunities to businesses and consumers alike to act upon environmentally-friendly values. These are also the topics that, above all, drive me at Plantconfident.
But how do all these - the commitment to environmental goals, the fear for animals, the appreciation of natural materials and plant-based food tie together, for a business? That’s what I am after in the “Building your plant-based story” series. Tag along!