🌱 ‘Veganuary is not dead, but it is changing’ - Christopher Kong, CEO and Co-founder of Better Nature Tempeh, spills the (soy)beans on his 3 wishes for the UK food industry.

Featuring Moving Mountains, Yume Food, BOL Foods, Beyond Meat and more...

Feb 05, 2024

Happy Monday!

This week we cover:

Quick Take: Is veganism really declining? If so, what does this mean for plant-based brands?
Brand Spotlight: Interview: Christopher Kong (Co-founder and CEO of Better Nature Tempeh) on Veganuary, the power of soy, working with My Emissions and his three wishes for the UK food industry.
In case you missed it: Pivoting to Plant Based: It worked for BOL foods. Featuring BOL foods, Lily's Kitchen, Treepoints, Caulibox and more...

Don’t miss out! Last week on we listed our top events in FMCG x Sustainability:

> Good News Last Week

🎯 Yume Food Australia, a food redistribution startup, announced that it has secured $2 million in seed funding led by Investible. This brings the platform’s total funding to date to $7 million, at an undisclosed valuation. Yume is already used by Unilever, Kellog Company, The Cordina Group and more.

🎯 Hobbs House Bakery announced that all of their buns are now made using regeneratively grown flour, to make sure all of their grain comes from healthier soils.

🎯 UNLTD, an alcohol-free beer, and smol, planet-friendly cleaning products, just announced that they are a B Corp certified company!

⭐️ Pandora announced that it has ended the use of virgin silver and gold in its jewellery a year ahead of schedule, where they set the target to only use certified recycled silver and gold by the start of 2025, but confirmed that it had achieved the milestone by the end of 2023. The 100% mark had been achieved earlier with gold, in early 2023, than with silver.

> Want good news sooner? We post every Friday on LinkedIn! If your FMCG brand has good news to share, let us know.

> Quick Take

Is veganism really declining? If so, what does this mean for plant-based brands?

Over the last year, the national press has been claiming veganism's demise. With critics suggesting veganism has reached its peak, it’s called into question the security of plant-based brands across the market. With the cost of living crisis and a change in consumer demands, can UK plant-based brands ride the wave?

Let's take a look at the rise of veganism, what's driving the change in consumer habits and most importantly what your brand can do to evolve with the market.

Veganism and it’s rise:

Since 2014, nearly 2.5 million people have signed up for Veganuary. Since then, plant-based products have boomed. In 2019 nearly a quarter of all products launched in the UK were labelled vegan. However, some have claimed that this is where veganism reached its peak.

According to figures by NIQ, in January 2023 sales of chilled meat alternatives fell 16.8% and frozen meat alternatives fell by 13.5%, compared with 2022. Brands such as Beyond Meat, Meatless Farm, and Oatly have reported struggling sales with some brands pulling products from the shelves. Does this suggest veganism is declining, and are the plant-based brands that sprung to the market here to stay?

The cost of living crisis driving the change:

The cost of living crisis has been identified as the key driver for changing consumer habits. With food price inflation reaching a high of 19.2% in March 2023, Maureen Hinton, an independent retail analyst, highlighted that consumers are cutting the cost of their grocery shopping starting with meat, dairy and plant-based meat substitutes.

Toni Vernelli, International Head of Policy and Communications at Veganuary, during a talk hosted by strategic creative agency Catch A Fire, identified that “taste and price are by far and away the greatest determiners of buying habits”. Vernelli said that although UK residents care a lot about animal welfare and sustainability when questioned, it doesn't translate into buying behaviour.

This correlates to the steady rise of own brand vegan products. Research from the GWI, showed there’s been an 11% rise in UK consumers opting for own-label products.

Health as a rising priority:

Health is also a rising priority for consumers which can be seen in the growth of health-focused plant-based brands, such as Better Nature Tempeh (read on for our interview with their CEO!) and Tofoo, with Tofoo’s Waitrose sales up 10% in the last year. A study by Faunalytics in 2021, found that in the US 42% of people’s vegan and vegetarian journeys were motivated by health, compared to 18% by environmental concern.

So, how should brands adjust their strategy to service changing consumer demands?

Bella Ali-Khan, Creative Strategist from Catch A Fire agency, advises that consumers have different focuses for their buying decisions - ethics, sustainability, and health. Brands should aim to make their offering clear by “creating a narrative around what your brand stands for…that supports your existing brand positioning".

We spoke to Eloise Bristow, the Head of Marketing at Moving Mountains, the brand that brought the first plant-based bleeding ‘beef’ burger to the market, who gave her take on the topic. “As we can see in our sales, consumer concerns over climate change aren’t going anywhere - we’re glad to provide an indulgent and delicious solution to this.”

Therefore, the market should match the varied demands of the audience - the plant-curious flexitarian who misses the taste of meat and the health-conscious shopper adding more veg and beans to their diets.

Catherine Shacklock, vegetarian and vegan buyer at Waitrose, said that “the vegan bubble hasn’t burst – it’s just maturing.” With the cost of living crisis and a growing health focus, the consumer profile for plant-based products is evolving.

The key to riding the wave will be to know your audience well, know what you offer them, and clearly communicate that to ensure brand growth, in Veganuary and beyond.

Learnt something new? Share this newsletter with a colleague!

👋 Interview: Christopher Kong (Co-founder and CEO of Better Nature Tempeh) on Veganuary, the power of soy, working with My Emissions and his three wishes for the UK food industry.

Better Nature Tempeh is on a mission to get 100 million people by 2030 eating tempeh, a staple of Indonesian cuisine for over 300 years. Founded in 2018, they’ve grown rapidly to a team of 11 and are now stocked across Tesco, Asda, Whole Foods, Planet Organic, Selfridges, Lidl and more…On top of this, they’re a certified B Corp who donate 1% of their sales to tackle malnutrition in Indonesia.

We chatted to Christopher Kong, Co-founder and CEO, to get his perspective on how Veganuary is evolving, learn more about tempeh, and hear his wishes for the UK’s food industry. Let’s take a look…

Let’s start with the basics - why is tempeh ‘better’ for us and our planet?

Simply put, tempeh is the most naturally nutritious plant-based protein out there. It’s a natural protein source that gives you so much more.

Not only does tempeh have more than double the protein content of chicken eggs, with similar protein quality to beef, it’s also packed full of fibre (more than double that of an apple)! On top of that, tempeh is made simply using fermented soybeans so it’s chock full of prebiotics which are great for the gut. It’s as minimally processed as you can get with only 3 ingredients (soybeans, water and starter culture), yet has a firm, meaty texture that allows it to be used in a myriad of ways - sliced, diced, grated, minced, and even blended into a smoothie! It’s truly a miracle food and we believe tempeh ought to be consumed as a staple in our diets given its health benefits and versatility.

As for the planet, tempeh produces 94-96% less CO2e than beef and uses 95% less land. Replacing the beef in your spag bol or chilli with tempeh can offset the same amount of carbon produced by a return trip on the Eurostar from London to Paris. Admittedly, soybeans get a bad rap but the vast majority of it (70%+) is used to produce animal feed to satiate our demand for animal proteins, lots are used to produce oils for other food products and cosmetics and only a slim percentage is used to make soybean-based food products like tofu and tempeh.

To put this into context, if all the tempeh we sold in 2023 replaced beef, we would have offset 4MT of CO2e which is equivalent to 2M return trips on the Eurostar from London to Paris or 90,000 return flights from London to Dublin. This is just the beginning of course! If all goes well this year, we expect to triple our impact in 2024 vs 2023.

You’ve worked with My Emissions to calculate your carbon footprint - did this process have any surprises?

This process was super eye-opening. We expected that our products would have a small carbon footprint when it came to its production and shipping but what we didn’t expect was how big an impact our suggested cooking instructions would have! For example, we used to have a BBQ Tempeh Ribz product which was best cooked in an oven (this was back in the days before air-fryers were a thing). However, by suggesting this, we inadvertently demoted this product from an “A”-rated product to a “B”! I’ve always been quite academic so getting a “B” was simply unacceptable. As such, we changed the cooking instructions and recommended that consumers pan-fry the product instead and managed to score all “A”s - just as we liked it.

You recently posted about how ‘veganuary is NOT dead, but it is changing’. What do you mean by this?

Veganuary this year just doesn’t have the same hype that it used to 2 or 3 years ago. I believe this is because the average consumer is less keen on going full-blown vegan but is more interested than ever in reducing their meat consumption by making simple swaps here and there.

As a result, I think plant-based brands should be less focused on launching products that are eaten just once or twice during a month-long meat purge (e.g. burgers that bleed). The market is already saturated with faux meats. Instead, they need to think more about how they can meet their customers where they are and make their products more enticing year-round.

For us, that means positioning tempeh not as a meat replacement (i.e. a food that takes meat away) but as a food that adds to the diet of our consumers by giving them so much more than meat can (e.g. fibre, gut health benefits, long shelf-life, versatility, etc.). This way, we don’t push our consumers to fully ditch their meat. Instead, we show them how they can improve their health and, more generally, their lives by adding our tempeh to their diets.

Magic wand time; if we could grant you three wishes for the food industry, what would they be?

I would wish that retailers applied the same margins to meat as they do to plant-based proteins. The average retailer charges the consumer roughly 40% margin for plant-based proteins whereas they only charge roughly 15% for meat. So if a brand sold plant-based protein and meat to a retailer for £1, the plant-based protein would end up costing ~£1.70 on the shelf whereas the meat would cost ~£1.20. This makes it pretty much impossible for most plant-based products to achieve price parity with meat which doesn’t do anything to shift consumer behaviour from meat consumption.

I would wish that some of the vast government subsidies used to subsidise the cost of meat be used to invest in alternative proteins, to create a healthier, more sustainable and profitable food system. In the EU, most cattle farmers receive 50% of their income in the form of government subsidies. The meat industry would topple overnight if these subsidies didn’t exist. Though there are some grants available for plant-based businesses, the funding from the government that goes into alternative proteins pales in comparison to that which goes to subsidising the cost of meat production. Though removing these subsidies would make meat unaffordable to many, it could make more healthy and sustainable sources of protein ubiquitous. And if these farmers were re-skilled in the process, they could earn a better living than they are now.

I would wish that the food industry cared more about our soil. Soil health is a topic of discussion that isn’t getting enough attention. It’s literally what our entire existence is built on! However, modern farming practices - driven by maximising yield for the lowest cost possible - actively degrade our soils. I recently read ‘Regenesis’ by George Monbiot and in there he talks about this a lot. It was such an eye-opener and I would recommend this book to everyone who cares about how we can sustainably feed our ever-growing (and hungry!) global population.

One of your core values is ‘Better for all, not a few’ - do you have a vision for what Better Nature’s impact has been in 10 years time? Where do you hope the food industry is then?

We’ve achieved so much over the last 8 months. It’s mad to think that since June last year we’ve launched into Tesco, Lidl, ASDA and Whole Foods Market. So the goal for 2024 is to try and keep up the growth trajectory that we’re on by doubling down on what we know is working with our consumers and customers. That means refining our packaging, messaging, sales strategy, marketing strategy, product pipeline, operations, etc. to make sure that we are executing as best as we can on the fundamental principles that have gotten us to where we are today and shedding any distractions that could impede our growth.

What this means in terms of goals is that we want to end 2024 with 3X the revenue we generated in 2023. If we manage this, the environmental impact would be tremendous. If all the tempeh we sell is consumed instead of beef, this would mean offsetting 12MT of CO2e.

👉 A huge thanks to Chris for taking the time to chat with us! Looking to get your hands on some Better Nature Tempeh? Trust us, it’s delicious, and there’s a handy store locator on their website or you can jump straight in to order from Tesco and Asda.

Take a closer look at Better Nature Tempeh:

Visit Website

*The Better Nature founding team - Fabio, Elin, Chris and Driando (left to right). Source: Better Nature’s own.*

> In case you missed it

🌱 Pivoting to Plant Based: It worked for BOL foods.

Featuring BOL foods, Lily's Kitchen, Treepoints, Caulibox and more...

Read the Full Newsletter

> Follow up with…

Article: Eating for Net Zero: transforming UK diets to deliver for climate and nature
Article: Veganuary at 10: it completely changed my life – but has the vegan bubble now burst?
Website: The Better Food Index
Report: Cost of living insights: Food

👉 Pssst - want to be featured in our ‘Meet the Partners’ series? Reach out here!