The Food Foundation has published its Rethinking Plant-Based Meat Alternatives report, which assesses the environmental and health impacts of plant-based options in the UK and their affordability.
The research used a taxonomy which looked at both nutrition and environmental indicators and price to assess how different categories and individual products compare to meat.
It divided the group into three categories:
- Processed (new generation), which includes plant-based meat alternatives such as Beyond MEAT, Vivera, Quorn, etc.
- Processed (traditional), which includes tofu, tempeh, seitan, etc.,
- Less processed alternatives, which include beans, legumes and pulses.
Key findings from the report include:
- The majority of plant-based meat alternatives come with significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs) and water footprints compared to meat.
- All three categories contained fewer calories, lower levels of saturated fat and higher levels of fibre on average.
- Less processed alternatives to meat (beans and grains) perform strongly on a number of different nutrition indicators, containing notably lower amounts of saturated fat, calories and salt and the highest amount of fibre per 100g of all categories compared to both meat and other plant-based meat alternatives. They are also the most affordable category per 100g.
- The nutritional profile of plant-based alternatives varies depending on the product and level of processing.
- The processed (new generation) alternative category is 73 per cent more expensive per 100g than the meat category, while the processed (traditional) category is 38 per cent more expensive.
- The proportion of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) within each plant-based meat alternative category analysed varies considerably, despite media and popular discourse often depicting all plant-based meat alternatives as being UPFs.
The report makes a number of recommendations for investors, food businesses and policymakers.
For investors, the report recommends that health/nutrition is a part of the conversation when investing in plant-based alternatives, in addition to environmental considerations. They should also be aware that, according to Boston Consulting Group, alternative proteins are the “most effective investment to achieve climate impact,” with the highest carbon dioxide equivalent savings per dollar of invested capital of any industry.
Investors should also use data to understand risks and opportunities facing companies and support their investment and engagement decision-making, the report notes.
Further, investors can engage with government, businesses and initiatives like the Investor Coalition on Food Policy to advocate for well-designed, streamlined and interoperable reporting regulations that will facilitate their investment and engagement decision-making.
For food businesses in the retail, manufacturing, and out-of-home sectors, the report says that they should ensure that plant-based meat alternatives are priced at the same level, if not cheaper, than meat products.
Promotional spend should also be redirected towards plant-based alternatives to make them more appealing, it says, with advertising strategies focused specifically on grains and beans as the most affordable, sustainable and healthiest plant-based alternatives, where intake is not patterned by level of income.
Where the nutrient profile of meat alternatives does not compare favourably to meat, businesses should reformulate so that plant-based alternatives have equivalent, or better levels of nutrition to meat, the report says.
They should also increase the availability of plant-based alternatives on supermarket shelves and on menus, it notes.
For policymakers, some of the report recommendations include:
- Strengthening government procurement rules for schools, hospitals, prisons, and other public spaces where food is served through a review of the Government Buying Standards for Food,
- Supporting the production and increased consumption of fruit, vegetables and legumes,
- Introducing fiscal incentives to ensure a level playing field for plant-based foods and alternative proteins,
- Increasing and building on current investment into alternative protein,
- Formally recognising the need to transition UK diets towards less meat,
- Rejecting proposals to interpret inherited EU law on the use of dairy names for plant-based products by restricting the use of deliberate misspellings to describe alternatives using words like ‘sheese’ and ‘mylk’ even where prefaced by ‘vegan’ or ‘plant-based’ descriptors.
For the full report, head here.