7 seconds to 17 WITH A PHENOMENALLY SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME TO GRAB SHOPPERS’ SHARE OF WALLET, ALT-MEAT PROCESSORS NEED TO PICK THEIR BATTLES IN 2025. by Lisa M. Keefe, editor in chief Plant-based T he alt-meat retail space is a game of inches now, and attri-tion. Pathways to success exist, it a reset — back to home-centricity, or people coming back to eating more from home or at home. And that’s been a big flip for retail from food service. You could say the first instinct for a lot of people is to go, ‘Well, they’re going to buy everything cheap. It must be all private label and ground meat.’ And it’s not. If you go through the store you’ll see in many cases the super-premium and premium items in different categories throughout the store that cost, say, 25% higher than the average in that category, and those sales are up. That’s partly the upper-income consumers buying, but it’s also people who are willing to treat themselves a little bit more because they’re eating at home. themselves as much. Can you break that down for us? DuBOIS: There is a bifurcation in in-come. But when you think about it from a lower income side, it may mean that they’re just not going out to food service or restaurants at all in some cases. And, in many cases, say, chicken’s about the same price it was in 2015. That’s not great when you’re Tyson and Perdue. But we’ve grown a lot of chick-ens and prices are where they are, and chicken is relatively inexpensive, pork is relatively inexpensive. Beef is the one that blows people’s minds. The meat de-partment’s high, but it’s not super high in that sense, with the exception of beef. though, if you know where to look. And Chris DuBois, executive vice president of Fresh Foods for Circana retail market research firm, knows where to look. He took the time to lay out his vision of the year to come with Alt-Meat . Alt-Meat: I’m getting mixed messag-es from the headlines. In 2025, can you help us understand where the consum-er is in terms of retail shopping for food? Inflation has moderated, but con-sumers don’t feel like it’s moderated. How does that drive shopping habits? CHRIS DuBOIS: The last three years in particular have hit the consumer hard. After many years of relatively flat, stable prices, there was an increase of 30%, 40%, 50% on the food side. The easy part, though, is that a lot of people internalize that in our industry and say, ‘Wow! Our products are up 30%!’ If you’re buying home or auto insur-ance, prices are up a lot more. Services, haircuts, anything related to cars, seems like it goes up. It’s not just food. What that means is, we’ve seen a retrenchment, almost — oh, I would call Alt-Meat: That brings me, then, to my question specifically about protein consumption. Proteins of whatever sort, animal-based or alternative meats, tend to be the most expen-sive part of a shopping trip. And yet what you’re saying is people are not shying away from paying the higher dollar because they’re balancing that against dining out. On the other hand, you have middle-and lower-income consumers who maybe are not treating Alt-Meat: How do these shopping trends then feed into alt-meat volume and velocity? Or is that marching to the beat of its own drummer? DuBOIS: It’s sort of marching to the beat of its own drummer, and it has its own set of problems. If I look at sales and velocity, there are just some things that are set up to cause problems from the get go. One would be the price gap to meat. If I look at the average price of what alternative meat products are in the marketplace, in many cases they’re Alt-Meat February 2025 31
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