Plant-based In 2025, the marketing needs to be laser-focused on the buyers that you really want to bring in. the quality of the alternative meats is improving over time, so what is causing the heavy buyers to fall away? DuBOIS: Part of it is, the price com-petition’s really hard right now. Heavy [alt-meat] buyers that are willing to buy meat — chicken patties and turkey burgers and things like that that have become cheaper — their volumes have been increasing. So the competition is seeing price declines again. When you’re running into the competition for the meat side and the ‘healthy halo’ meats are doing well — the competition’s really there, and it isn’t so much Impossible vs Beyond. It’s much more about alt-meats vs regular healthy meats on that side because that game has gotten more competitive with the price declines. get that product fit right, the whole thing can begin to fall apart quick. A second one is the heavy buyers. They’re important because they are 19% driving 75% of the dollar value. That’s a ridiculous amount compared to most categories. The hard part is, we’re losing heavy buyers more than some of the other categories of buyers. We’ve got to stop that buyer loss be-cause if not, things will continue to go down. Both goals are achievable. through in the case and making the case for why alt-meat needs its own set of doors, and how you get the signage right, how to pull people into that aisle. That’s the signage that has to stop consumers in their tracks, so it’s all the point of purchase. It’s getting your packaging to lay up right. But all that’s doable. Alt-Meat: Yes, especially at this point, with people still feeling the push of inflation. DuBOIS: People know what a ribeye steak is, and if they go to Costco it’s $12.99 or whatever, right? If I pay up, I know what I’m getting. When you’re asking people to pay a premium for a product, they wonder, ‘is it that much better? Is it worth that gap?’ The product has to be worth that gap, and the market’s telling us it’s not. This, to me, is a long game. We’re talking at a point in time right now and yes, the numbers are pretty rough, but it’s still a billion-dollar category. That’s a lot of money here in the U.S. What can’t happen is, you can’t just say, ‘Let’s try to defend everywhere,’ meaning all the fresh items. Frozen, to me, that’s where you make the stand. To me, in 2025, it’s going to be all about customer intimacy. The market-ing needs to be laser-focused on the buyers that you really want. This is not about winning everywhere. It’s about protecting that 14% that really buy your products today and finding maybe the next 3 to 4 percentage points of the U.S. population to bring in. Alt-Meat February 2025 Alt-Meat: Are there any changes that you would suggest alt-meat companies make, particularly in terms of flowing through the retail channel? DuBOIS: Let me let me turn that back around to some things that are going really well. Like Beyond Meat’s steak product. Consumer response has been pretty good on the eating side, and it’s something from a form side that’s continued to grow. Impossible Foods put out spicy chicken nuggets, so that’s a flavor-form-texture that kind of hits. That’s not just, ‘Here’s another patty.’ Also, finding new ways to have plant-based meat be an ingredient in a stir fry or something else, totally works. But this is also all about getting the packaging right, looking at what goes Alt-Meat: I want to drill down a little bit on the heavy buyers, because, as you said, it’s a bit of an anomaly that you have such a high percentage of heavy buyers driving so much of the sales. I think it’s generally considered that 35
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