Plant-based RILEY JACKSON 12 Alt-Meat August 2025 PETE SPERANZA FORMER CEO, WICKED FOODS; CEO, ROXIISUPERCUBE The word ‘vegan’ fell into this angry niche, which turned people off, so the move to ‘plant-based’ seems like a nice, natural fit that encompasses more of the types of businesses in the sector. But people are misusing the term in some ways we’ve just started to navigate. For example, there’s some companies that are using ‘plant–based’ as a descrip-tor for a product that still has ingredients that are animal-based. That could confuse consumers quite a bit. Generally speaking, plant-forward, 100% veg-gies, whatever you want to call it — I think there are other nomenclatures that could be leveraged over time. ‘Plant-based’ is still the most friendly way to talk about it right now, but I can see that changing as more large companies like Cargill and General Mills get involved and subtly change the meaning. HEAD OF BRAND AND MARKETING, IVY FARM As an industry, I think, we’ve pivoted away from ‘vegan’ because it, unfortunately, has a lot of energy around it. ‘Plant-based,’ though, to me, has a much broader application. It gets people a little bit curious, in my experience, about what they’re eating. And I think we could all use more curiosity around what we’re putting in our bodies and what our ingredient label says. So I like that people are asking that question. But I do believe as the products evolve, we’ll see other iterations of the term down the pipeline.
Alt-Meat August 2025: Page 12
