A meaty marketing mystery

This summer I won a silent auction for a case of plant-based sausage for about $25. That’s dinner for a month at less than a $1/night – I was shocked I won with such a low bid. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, though, because apparently no one else wants the stuff.

After a lot of promise and even adoption by major fast-food chains, sales of plant-based meat have underperformed expectations. One producer, Beyond Meat, has lost 70% of its stock value and recently laid off 4% of its workforce. Impossible Meat, its main rival, also is struggling.

There are various hypotheses about what is going on.  Plant-based meat is still expensive, the taste/texture isn’t quite what you expect from real meat, and the category has become politicized, with Cracker Barrel receiving flak for being “too woke” when it added a plant-based burger to its menu.

It might just come down to the fact that, as one analyst puts it, “It’s going to take time to change cultural practices. It’s not going to happen overnight.”  Plant-based dairy alternatives comprise 15% of that market, but they have been around for much longer than plant-based meat and also have benefited from the relative prevalence of lactose intolerance in the population.

This feels like a marketing issue, too. Impossible Meats brags about “science” on its website, but new researchsuggests boasting about science for a product that is supposed to provide sensory pleasure is likely to backfire. Both Beyond Meat and Impossible emphasize health and environmental benefits but that may not really be why many people buy their product. All that is fine, but people still want something that tastes good.

It has been said that one job of marketing is to make the unfamiliar seem familiar…and the familiar seem unfamiliar. Maybe these brands are, instead, keeping the unfamiliar unfamiliar. In other words, too much talk about health and science and not enough about genuine meat taste.  Perhaps restaurants need to think more carefully about how they name these products, too – the right name can affect how people perceive taste and the authenticity of the product.

If you were marketing plant-based meat, what would you try?