If you bought shares in fake meat companies, you are more than aware of the market’s collapse for plant-based meat products. Some companies have lost up to 75% of their share value, laid off thousands of employees and even gone bankrupt. That’s a long way from the giddy heights of 2019 when fake meat companies were the darlings of the investment world, and mainstream media were predicting real meat would soon be history. Retailers were falling over themselves trying to get fake meat into their stores – many deviously placed fake products next to real meats to fool the consumer into thinking the products were similar.
True enough, consumers got caught up in the hype and virtue signalling about how fake meats would save the planet. Folks by the millions tried the brave new world of plant-based meats and found the flavour wanting and more expensive. Those are two negative consumer responses that kill off new products. Despite those responses, changing consumer-entrenched eating habits is still hard. For instance, in a previous life I was involved in the lamb industry and tried to promote more lamb meat consumption. Taste testing was the focus of the promotion, and interestingly, it was quite successful. Yet consumers had pre-conceived negative notions about eating lamb that were very hard to overcome.
What didn’t help fake meat marketers was that they couldn’t get around the negative that fake hamburgers were a chemical soup of up to 30 different ingredients. Although advocates liked to imply that fake burgers were healthier, consumers didn’t quite fall for that ploy. In the eyes of consumers, at least real meat burgers were made of one ingredient: “real meat.” It also didn’t help that the big meat retailers, the fast-food chains, were less than enthusiastic in promoting a fake product that was utterly opposed to the genuine product that was central to the very existence of their corporate identity.
MacDonalds came to the bandwagon late, and their reluctance proved to be insightful. With their vast advertising power and presence, it seemed that fake burgers were irrelevant to their corporate master marketing plan. As the fake demand faltered, it was quickly off their menu – the same fate faced their brief interlude into offering salad on their menu.
After seeing the fake hamburger demand dive, manufacturers quickly decided that diversification was the answer. Thanks to clever food scientists, fake pork, chicken, and fish products were soon on the market. Most of those products didn’t last long as consumers seemed to be no more interested in those fake products than in counterfeit burgers.
But God bless fake food entrepreneurs; they certainly keep on trying – despite all their setbacks in creating and maintaining demand for a bedazzling array of fake meat or fish products. Research continues to develop lab-grown (also called cultured) meat, which is almost identical in molecular structure to the genuine product. It continues to show promise but has a negative “artificial” connotation.
The latest fake food product to become the centre of marketing hype is a product that has actually been around for 70 years or more – its fake butter. Some might recall that product used to be called margarine; however, as promoters point out, margarine could contain small amounts of animal products. Be that as it may, making margarine entirely from vegetable oils was always cheaper. The much hyped allegedly new plant-based butters are, for all intents, the same as the old margarine varieties. It’s a rather old story, but it was approached differently back in the day.
When margarine (now called plant-based butter) came to the market many decades ago, it was attacked by the dairy industry as a butter-like imposter that confused consumers. Back then, the dairy industry lobby successfully got governments across North America to outlaw the sale of yellow-coloured margarine – it could only be sold in the white form, and even the package size had to be different. According to the dairy lobby, consumers were too dumb to know the difference if butter and margarine looked alike. Actually, they could probably figure it out, as margarine was usually cheaper.
The absurd colour ban was repealed everywhere in the 1990s. Quebec was the last jurisdiction in North America to enforce the margarine colour ban – it was only rescinded in 2008. Incredibly, the Supreme Court upheld the Quebec ban in 2005. That same Quebec-centric national dairy lobby now implies that milk would be unsafe without national dairy supply management. Yeah right.
Will Verboven is an ag opinion writer.
