If you are a long-term investor then you should know about the megatrend. Megatrend means a quick and powerful transformative force that could change the global economy, business and society. Like the EV revolution in the auto sector. So the question is, Is meatless meat the next megatrend in FMCG? Let’s figure it out.
To figure out this first we need to understand what is meatless meat!? It sounds interesting, right? Meat without meat. It is basically a plant-based protein. Nowadays the world is shifting towards this “meatless meat”. Basically, plant-based protein. It sounds similar to vegan. Like no dairy and animal products. So, in the substitution of milk, they used soya milk or almond milk and instead of chicken nuggets they used a plant-based version of soya and pea protein. Now you get the idea of What we are discussing here.
This sounds like we are bluffing. Let’s check the facts. Around 3 per cent of the world’s population is identified as following a plant-based diet. The number is very small but it’s continuously increasing. As we act as megatrend identifiers you do have to be sufficiently early to make the most of it. The plant-based shifting is in the early phase right now. There is an initiative called Veganuary. It’s an initiative that people from around the world sign up for it and live off the plant-based diet for January month. The movement was started three years ago and now it’s very popular and marked a 200 per cent increase in sigh ups.
After the corona pandemic, people are becoming very conscious of the food they are eating. They know that a meat-based diet is not always the best and most healthy option. Nowadays people are more conscious about environmental impact also. In India, research was conducted by the Good Food Institute India. In that, they mention that 63 per cent of the Indian non-vegetarian are likely to be a recurring consumer of plant-based protein substitution. No doubt that the research was conducted only in the metro city. But even then the number is very convincing.
Every such trend is most likely to be followed in metro cities of India. If you lived in Banglore and you open the food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato you can find a whole variety of results spanning multiple pages. Such as chocolates, ice creams, nuggets, sauces and even beauty care products. You can find these types of plant-based products in every supermarket. It means the popularity of plant-based products is increasing day by day.
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You can find lots of startups around this segment. For example, a mother and son duo founded a startup called One Good which is providing plant-based food. The list is very long and includes some celeb-backed startups like Blue Tribe backed by Virat Kohli and Anushka, Imagine Meats founded by Riteish Deshmukh and Genelia, Shaka Harry teams up with celeb chef Manu Chandra and many more.
Not just startups some big players also try to catch the trend. Early this year ITC one of the biggest players in the Indian FMCG launched plant-based protein products under its new brand called Chef IncrEdible. And last month TATA’s FMCG company called Tata Consumer Products announced its own plant-based protein brand called, Simply Better.
Every coin has two sides till now we only see the good part of the meatless meat megatrend. Now let’s have a look at the other side of the megatrend. If you visit the ITC IncrEdible website you can observe that the price of plant-based burger patties and plant-based nuggets are high in comparison to actual meat products. The response is very mixed up for taste also. It does not taste like actually chicken. Let’s compare actual meat with meatless meat. Actual chicken grill patty for 500 gms they charged around 320 to 350 but on ITC IncrEdible site they charged 630 for meatless. It is almost 2.8 times more expensive.
Conclusion:
At the moment we can not predict whether these types of plant-based products are bound to fail or going to succeed. We only do one thing that is waiting and watch the market. And when you get the confidence you can take a bet on that. For that, you need a Demat and trading account and you can open it in just 3 minutes by clicking here.