Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co. and author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World.
The views expressed in this guest article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
The plant-based meat sector in the past few years has generated nearly as many obituaries as it has alt-burgers. Depending on whom you ask, the culprit is taste, clean label concerns, the manosphere, capitalism, Donald Trump, or perhaps Mercury in retrograde.
I’d offer a more mundane primary explanation: groceries got expensive.
Plant-based meat sales were soaring until inflation hit. As food got more expensive, consumers became more price-sensitive. Since plant-based meat is currently nearly always priced higher—about 77% higher—than animal-based meat, consumers need a very compelling reason to even occasionally make the switch.
The timing is hard to ignore: plant-based meat’s retail slowdown began just as inflation made grocery shoppers more price-sensitive.
Inflation is the enemy
Inflation began accelerating in 2021, with US CPI up 7% by December and peaking at 9.1% in June 2022. Grocery inflation was even more relevant: food-at-home prices were up 12.2% by June 2022 and 13.5% by August. At nearly the same time, plant-based meat went from soaring to stalling: after a 45% dollar-sales jump in 2020, US plant-based meat sales were flat in 2021, then fell 1% in 2022 and 12% in 2023, with unit sales falling even faster.
That doesn’t prove inflation caused the decline. But it does suggest that asking consumers to pay a premium for plant-based meat became a lot harder just as grocery bills were becoming more painful.
It also suggests that taste alone can’t explain plant-based meat’s troubles. After all, some plant-based meat products really are already competing on taste. In a large 2025 blind taste test from NECTAR, certain plant-based burgers, nuggets, and chicken filets came close to animal-meat parity, with 47% of tasters rating plant-based burgers the same as or better than the animal benchmark. This is especially true for Impossible products, in particular.
Needless to say, price and health alone aren’t sufficient to displace animal meat. If they were, we’d have McLentils and Big Bean Macs by now. Legumes are cheap and great for us, but taste remains the undisputed king, and most people think meat tastes better than beans.
But taste is only one factor; price still dominates many food-purchasing decisions, especially during inflationary periods.
There are already hints of what this looks like in practice. At the same time the broader plant-based meat sector has been contracting, Rebellyous Foods has made price parity its north star for plant-based chicken sold into US public schools. The company says its products now reach more than five million students in more than 390 school districts, while it grew 30-60 year over year from 2021 through 2025.
The processing panic didn’t help
Second, plant-based meat suffered from a concerted campaign tying these foods to the dreaded “ultra-processed” label, with critics falsely but repeatedly using terms like “fake” and “lab-made” to describe protein-rich foods that didn’t rely on animal slaughter.
Never mind that many of the most popular foods Americans already eat are ultra-processed, including plenty of animal-based meats, even those animal-based meats that are tied to higher cancer risk. But once consumers started hearing that plant-based burgers are “fake” or “ultra-processed,” the health halo for some consumers dimmed.
And if the health halo dims while the price premium remains, especially as consumers have less cash in their pocket for food due to inflation, the consumer’s question becomes painfully rational: Why pay more for something I’m not sure is better for me?
Of course, plant-based meat is typically better for us: all of the products that consumers liked best in the NECTAR study were lower in saturated fat and cholesterol than animal-based meat, while being higher in fiber. They’re also all lower in caloric density, which appears to be the most important reason that ultraprocessed foods are generally less healthy than less processed foods.
(It’s also better for the planet and animal welfare, though these aren’t primary drivers of most consumers’ food decisions.)
To be clear, this doesn’t mean there’s no demand. It just means the value proposition weakened, and will be strengthened when alt-meat competes on price.
The Old World is more bullish on new meat
Consider Europe. Germany didn’t repeal the laws of consumer behavior; it illustrated them. When cheaper private-label plant-based products expanded, shoppers bought more.
In Germany, Europe’s biggest plant-based market, plant-based sales across six categories reached €1.68 billion in 2024, up 6.8% from 2022. Even more interesting, sales volume rose 13.5% over that period. In other words, this wasn’t just inflation making dollar sales look better. Germans were buying more, while also cutting their animal-based meat consumption.
Why? A big reason appears to be affordability. In Germany, private-label plant-based products—generally cheaper store-brand options—drove the gains. Their sales volume rose 41.4% from 2022 to 2024, while branded products declined. France, Italy, and Spain saw similar private-label-driven growth.
That’s the lesson: when plant-based products taste great and become more affordable, consumers respond.
Milking the price point
Plant-based milk tells the same story in the US. It’s not perfect, but compared to plant-based meat, it’s become far more mainstream. It works in coffee. It works on cereal. Oat milk in particular doesn’t ask consumers to sacrifice much; many people actually prefer the taste. And in many foodservice settings, plant-based milk now costs consumers the same as cow’s milk.
Once coffee chains stop penalizing customers with surcharges, adoption becomes much easier.
How change happens
This is how displacement usually works. New products rarely win because consumers decide to become more virtuous. They win because they become cheaper, tastier, more convenient, or otherwise superior.
Kerosene displaced whale oil because it was cheaper and worked better. Bicycles and cars displaced horses because they were cleaner, cheaper, and more practical. Metal pens replaced goose quills because they were simply better writing instruments.
Animal-free meat is likely to follow a similar pattern.
The lesson from the recent downturn is not that consumers have abandoned the plant-based meat sector to history’s graveyard. They’re still buying far more than a decade ago, and in some markets they’re actually buying more than even a few years ago.
It’s a truism to say that plant-based meat must keep improving on taste; of course that’s accurate. But the real lesson here is that plant-based meat needs also to compete not just on higher values—on which it wins every time—but also on the basic proposition of helping consumers where they care about it the most: their pocketbooks.
If plant-based meat costs more and is perceived as less healthy, it will struggle. If it reaches price parity, tastes great, and can credibly claim nutritional benefits (which it easily can), it can grow.
In other words, the plant-based meat movement’s call to action seems clear, yet of course much easier said than done: make price parity the cost of admission. Better taste gets consumers interested. Better nutrition gives them permission. But better economics is what keeps the products in the cart.
