Could the best burger be plant-based? Moving Mountains founder seeks to flip consumer expectations

19 Mar 2019 --- Growing consumer and retail interest is providing ample opportunity for food & beverage suppliers to benefit from the plant-based craze currently sweeping the globe. Still, industry investment in raw materials and well as company tenacity to continuously up the ante in terms of quality are vital in sustaining this trend. This is according to Simeon van der Molen, Founder of Moving Mountains, who spoke with FoodIngredientsFirst about successfully marketing plant-based offerings to audiences well beyond vegan consumers, as well as the future of the growing meat alternatives category.

Moving Mountains is the UK company behind a premium, fully plant-based burger, with ingredients including beetroot to give it a characteristic “bleeding juiciness.” First launched in March 2018 at London restaurant Mildreds, the company has enjoyed impressive media attention and popularity, allowing it to scale up significantly in the space of a year.

At the end of February, the company announced a new US$12 million, three-year partnership which will see Rastelli Foods, a supplier to hotels, restaurants and retail markets, launch Moving Mountains’ namesake burger to restaurants in the Middle East. This came just a few weeks after the announcement of a major deal with meat distributor Jan Zandbergen, which will place the burger onto the menus of thousands of restaurants, cafes and fast food chains across Europe through Jan Zandbergen’s network.

The choice of partnering with such a big name in the meat sector may come as a surprise to some, but van der Molen explains that the move reflects the company’s goal of “infiltrating” the European meat market, as part of its strategy to appeal to a broader group than just vegans.

Simeon van der Molen, Founder of Moving Mountains“Even though we are doing well in the UK market, the European market is different: it’s a lot more fragmented and doesn’t have big players that supply the whole foodservice market. If we take France as an example, restaurants may prefer to buy from small distributors, because they think they get better quality or service. However, distribution by big companies to restaurants does happen in the meat category, which is why Zandbergen came onto our radar,” van der Molen explains.

At a time when flexitarianism is gaining ground, plant-based/meat industry collaborations could help appeal to a range of consumers who may have certain connotations regarding the social and nutritional ideas surrounding proteins.

“There is a masculine slant to eating beef and meat. Some consumers don’t want to be seen ordering from a vegan menu which is why we have told restaurants not to list our burger as vegan, but to list it as plant-based or the Moving Mountains burger and to list it on the main menu among beef,” he says.

Beyond expanding in distribution capacities, since its small-scale launch last year the company has continued improving and refining its product, van der Molen explains, with bespoke flavors, in particular, bringing the product closer to consumers’ expectations of “juicy” burgers.

“We realized that people associate beef with grilled, fatty flavors, not necessarily beef flavors,” he explains. “Many off-the-shelf vegetarian products will slap a grilled flavor on the product, with some herbs and spices, which normally does the trick. However, we are going for a much more authentic approach by using natural flavorings to replicate fatty, beef flavors, cooked burger flavors, as well as more grilled flavors.”  

Despite major UK supermarkets expanding their plant-based ranges, shoppers will not – for the time being at least – be able to find Moving Mountains burgers in the retail aisles. The main reason, van der Molen explains, is that the company is seeking to provide a premium product.

“Our strategy is to supply to restaurants and that is what makes us unique. If you look at current similar offerings in supermarkets, they feature a lot of relatively overpriced products packed with low-quality ingredients and we don’t want to be on the same shelf as those kinds of products. We want to build our reputation in foodservice and want to be known for a premium, quality brand. Later on, we can look at supplying supermarkets,” he states.

“More companies need to show the tenacity and ambition to want to make the change to better quality products,” he says.

This upgrade in quality may eventually be necessary if the plant-based industry wants to appeal to meat eaters and actively target a reduction in the consumption of meat.

“The difference is not to be made by targeting vegans or vegetarians; we market toward the new wave of millennials who are seeking to cut down on their meat consumption, whether that’s for health, environmental or animal welfare reasons,” van der Molen says.

The growing meat alternatives and plant-based space
Plant-based growth has been a key theme for several years, but the extent to which it grew into the total mainstream became incredibly clear throughout 2018. According to data from Innova Market Insights, there has been a 45 percent average annual growth in food & beverage launches with a vegan positioning (CAGR, 2013-2017). 

Investments in plant proteins continue within the ingredients space too. In mid-December 2018, Ingredion announced several steps to accelerate production of plant-based proteins globally, joining a combined US$140 million of strategic investments which will seek to expand the broad range of plant-based protein solutions. As a result, two North American manufacturing facilities are to produce pea-protein isolates and a range of pulse-based flours and concentrates in 2019. Ingredion said at the end of last year that it’s making “significant capital investments” to transform a soy processing facility in South Sioux City, Nebraska, to produce protein isolates from peas, having purchased the site in February. 

And according to van der Molen, we should be seeing more of such supplier investment to keep apace with growth in the plant-based space.

“A lot of investors are looking to what is going to be the next big brand but there’s a long chain involved in getting products to market. It all starts with the raw material. Big protein suppliers such as Roquette, DuPont and ADM need to be scaling up and investors should be looking at those companies,” he says. 

Other investments options would be new companies in the proteins raw material space, exactly because established companies can only just about cope with demand. 

“If plant-based becomes as big as the industry is predicting we’ll need a lot more material producers, a lot more facilities. Investors need to be looking at the whole supply chain. Big companies know this, and they are buying up companies all along the supply chain. You could go further back all the way to the farms. Making the end product is one thing, but there’s supply and demand, companies like Roquette are expanding, but it’s not yet enough.”

Although van der Molen was initially intrigued by the idea of cell-cultured meats –another hot topic in the meat alternatives space – the practicalities of R&D steered Moving Mountains’ towards the plant-based category. Still, he says, “it is the answer to a lot of the world’s problems.”

“My view is that we are still decades away from appearing on supermarket shelves,” he says.

“But whether people think lab-meat is [attractive] or not, as soon as it scales up to something meaningful, the meat companies will adopt it and push it on to us. It will definitely happen, but the question is when. For now, it’s all about plant-based, because that is what is available to us now,” he concludes.

By Lucy Gunn