2025-04-24 06:42:12
Berlin alt-meat maker Project Eaden uses fiber spinning technology to produce whole cuts of plantbased meat.
Leading the charge
Last year, when the German Society of Nutrition updated its dietary guidelines to suggest a 50% reduction in conventional meat and a diet of 75% plant-based foods, the writing was already on the wall.
Germans are — and have been — leading the plant-based meat transition in a big way. In 2023, annual per capita meat consumption in Germany fell to a record low of 114 pounds. In 2022, it was 121 pounds. In 2011, it was 138 pounds.
And the German legacy meat brands throwing their hats in the ring are being generously rewarded.
Rügenwalder Mühle, a 191-year-old conventional meat company, added a few plant-based meat SKUs in mid-2014 and, in 2021, reported that its plant-based meat sales had surpassed sales of conventional proteins. By early 2024, the company had “retired” its classic conventional black forest ham product to free up production resources and make more plant-based alt-meats.
In 2020, German family-owned meat producers Kemper and Reinert merged to form a new company — the second-largest meat processing company in the German market — eventually taking a new name and a new whole-protein approach to business. Under the InFamily Foods umbrella, the company now includes Family Butchers (conventional meat), The Plantly Butchers (plant-based meat) and The Cultivated B (cultivated meat).
Even grocery chains are getting into the game: The REWE Group, a retail and tourism co-operative based in Cologne, invested generously in foodtech startup Project Eaden, even signing on to be the alt-meat company’s exclusive launch partner. The pair estimate that consumers will be able to purchase Project Eaden’s alt-pork products in REWE stores by mid-2025.
The reason for the enthusiastic shift? While there are many different theories, the prevailing wisdom in Germany is that the kids are alright.
“Among the young people, you can see a cultural change, because they are much more aware of what they eat, how they consume,” Inka Dewitz, senior program officer for international food policy with Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German think tank, has said.
Whatever the reason for the shift, former Rügenwalder Mühle CEO Christian Rauffus likely isn’t surprised by the outcome.
Just over a decade ago, he told a reporter from German newspaper Die Welt that “sausage will be the cigarette of the future,” adding that, though the change worried him as a meat executive, “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to eat meat in moderation.”
“My generation is perhaps the first in human history to be able to eat meat every day. And I predict it will also be the last,” he said in 2014. “Because younger generations don’t want to do that anymore.”
This is an ad for meat eaters
As a plant-based meat startup, you can’t easily disconnect your brand from the soy protein isolates and textured vegetable protein of the 1970s or from the raft of questionable plant-based alt-meats that have flooded grocery stores in the past 10 years.
But you can make ’em laugh. And when you’re trying to sell a product that’s deeply polarizing and connected in pop culture with dour militant vegans, going for the joke is an easy way to generate mass market appeal.
“For many, plantbased is still serious, self-righteous,” Chris White, founder of the food brand design agency This Way Up, has said. “Humor plays an important role in breaking down the stigmas, opening the door to wider audiences.”
As a differentiator and attention-getter, many plant-based altmeat brands — like La Vie, THIS and Planted — have developed an irreverent, playful and sometimes slightly rebellious brand voice, poking fun at themselves, each other and the conventional meat sector as well as meddling governments that might try (and fail) to regulate their products into oblivion.
The resulting tongue-in-cheeky ad campaigns are deeply weird and deeply inspired by groan-worthy Dad jokes. And they’re honestly funny: In February 2023, UK plant-based chicken maker VFC put up a series of billboards featuring comments the company had received from anti-vegan trolls. A popular favorite: “I’d rather stick a wasp up my bum than eat VFC.”
In December 2023, Impossible Foods dropped a Hallmark-style rom com trailer promoting its new plant-based hot dogs. The male lead is a competitive eater, and the trailer kicked off “12 days of holi-dogs.”
In July 2024, legacy alt-meat maker Field Roast rolled out ads with Charli XCX promoting “Brat Summer” and its bratwurst. (See what they did there?)
In April 2025, Beyond Meat and French food-tech company La Vie staged a light-hearted flame war on social media, eventually launching a burger collab at UK chain Honest Burger. They’re calling it a “brand-mance,” and all of Instagram is rooting for them.
But it’s about more than just attention-getting and joke-making. As Nature’s Fynd Chief Marketing Officer Karuna Rawal has said, “A well-crafted campaign built on deep consumer insights can change behavior and culture.”
Yes, the marketing moves are funny, silly and even arch, but they’re also directing attention to important issues and opening up opportunities for thought, conversation and perhaps even systemic change.
Take, for example, Redefine Meat’s 2022 “Cow Repurposing Institute” marketing blitz. The image of a cow massaging a human elicits laughs, but the idea that there’s something else a steak dinner might have wanted to do with its life is sobering, if you think about it.
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