Trends and Opportunities in the Global Plant-Based Meat Industry

Abstract

Producing meat-like products directly from plants instead of animals creates significant gains in production and market efficiencies. Emerging innovation in plant-based meat shows promise for revolutionizing the food system, and global growth in the plant-based meat industry has exploded over the past few years. Identifying the most important white space ideas, prioritizing the research needed to explore them, and solving related technical issues across the entire value chain—from crop development to foodservice and retail distribution—constitute the highest impact strategies for enabling plant-based meat to help supply the global demand for meat. Four areas in need of additional research and development are crop optimization specifically for plant-based meat formulations, alternative manufacturing methods, expanded production capacity, and product sensory improvements. If successfully implemented on a global scale, a food system with a much greater reliance on plant-based meat-like products has the potential to sustainably feed 9.7 billion people by 2050 and mitigate climate change and other pressing environmental problems. Furthermore, inappropriate use of antibiotics in food animals contributes to antimicrobial resistance, and it is estimated that three of four new or emerging infectious diseases in humans are transmitted from animals. Thus, modernizing meat production by reducing use of animals in the food system can decrease the risk of global public health issues such as antibiotic resistance and