“Call to arms”: GFI urges food leaders to boost ingredient & manufacturing capacity for plant-based meat

26 Jan 2022 --- The burgeoning global appetite for slaughter-free diets is squeezing cornerstone ingredients, like coconut oil and pea protein, highlights new analysis from The Good Food Institute (GFI). The report underscores the mammoth investment opportunities while also underscoring how ingredient and manufacturing capacity for plant-based meat in the cultured meat space needs to be strengthened.

The non-profit organization has published a scenario-based analysis outlining the expected ingredient volume and manufacturing facility requirements for the plant-based meat industry to identify and mitigate future production bottlenecks.  

The report flags that demand from the plant-based meat industry could account for nearly 20% of the world’s coconut supply by 2030, for example. 

Early movers will have a huge advantage when it comes to securing prestigious partnerships and contracts with plant-based meat companies that are poised for rapid growth.

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst, Dr. Liz Specht, vice president of science and technology at GFI, underscores the competitive advantage of making bold, early investments in processing and manufacturing capacity to meet this looming demand.

“The consensus is clear among market analysts that aggressive growth in consumer demand will continue for plant-based meat products – especially when recognizing that product quality and taste will continue to improve with greater R&D and stiffer competition,” she remarks. 

“Price points will continue to decrease as plant-based meat companies tap into greater economies of scale.”

However, she concedes that relatively little attention has been paid to what is required to meet that consumer demand from the perspective of “steel in the ground” and massive shifts in ingredient supply chains.

“This report is really a call to arms,” she stresses. “Investments in new processing and manufacturing capacity – as well as greater investments in R&D to develop innovative solutions to these bottlenecks, such as novel fat sources, more efficient protein enrichment processes or higher-protein crop varieties – will pay off handsomely.”

Scaling rapid growth for the long haul
With Innova Market Insights pegging “Plant-Based: The Canvas for Innovation” as its second Top Trend for 2022, plant-based R&D has refocused from mimicking meat, fish and dairy to optimizing and diversifying options.

Sector pioneers such as Motif FoodWorks – netting the largest food-tech raise of US$226 million in Series B funding – have been the first to ride this investment wave. Earlier this month, the first global Exchange Traded Fund of publicly traded plant-based food companies launched on the New York Stock Exchange. 

“Early movers will have a huge advantage when it comes to securing prestigious partnerships and contracts with plant-based meat companies that are poised for rapid growth for the long haul,” echoes Dr. Specht.

“But I think it will come as a surprise to many just how quickly this bottleneck will arise,” she asserts.

“We are projecting that without the commercialization of novel fat solutions – such as producing animal-like fats through microbial fermentation and developing novel oil structuring and encapsulation methods to impact animal fat-like properties to plant fats.”

Fortunately, she highlights: “There is a whole suite of start-up companies and internal R&D initiatives at incumbent ingredient suppliers that have launched in recent months to address this need, and we hope this report incentivizes even more activity in this area.”

Last August, industry titans Barry Callebaut and Nestlé launched a scorecard together with Proforest to define and develop sustainable practices in coconut production and address “untackled challenges” across the sector.

The burgeoning global appetite for slaughter-free diets is squeezing cornerstone ingredients, like coconut oil and pea protein.“The time for infrastructure investment is now”
Based on publicly available forecasts of plant-based meat demand and production needs, the GFI report explores a hypothetical production scenario. By 2030, it forecasts that plant-based meat will have captured 6% of the global meat and seafood market, representing 25 million metric tons of annual plant-based meat production.

The non-profit organization estimates that the industry will need to operate at least 800 manufacturing facilities – each producing on average 30,000 metric tons of product annually – at a cost of at least US$27 billion within the decade, underscoring the importance and urgency of bold infrastructure investments.

The private sector – investors, ingredient processors, extrusion equipment providers, and manufacturers alike – can realize significant financial upside by building out this new supply chain, GFI stresses.

“This report only examines plant-based meat, but we know that fermentation-derived alternative proteins and cultivated meat will make up an increasing share of the overall alternative meat market in the coming years. This model can be expanded to incorporate these production pillars,” says Dr. Specht.

Although cultivated meat will likely just be starting to reach true commercial-scale production later this decade, she forecasts that it will likely be introduced in the form of hybrid products composed largely of plant protein ingredients.

This prediction was recently echoed by Eric Jenkusky, CEO of cell-based meat scaffolding provider Matrix Meats, in an interview with FoodIngredientsFirst.

In addition, Dr. Specht notes that fermentation is expanding quickly and may be able to go a long way toward filling these gaps, in large part due to its incredibly high productivity for a given facility footprint because microorganisms are so fast-growing. “Microbial biomass can often double in just a few hours, depending on the strain,” she underlines.

Eying new forms of extrusion tech
The GFI analysis can also be expanded to include more forms of plant-based meat manufacturing than just low- and high-moisture extrusion, Dr. Specht continues. 

“While those are the current predominant methods of production, several other methods are also in use or are in development phase, such as classical mixing and forming techniques and newer approaches like shear cell and 3D printing,” she highlights.

“A wider variety of approaches to making plant-based meat may help alleviate the bottlenecks associated with obtaining capital-intensive equipment like extruders.”

Last November, FoodIngredientsFirst attended Redefine Meat’s unveiling of what was previously considered “technologically impossible” for plant-based meat – whole cuts of 3D-printed vegetable meat that “bleed” like traditional beef and lamb cuts.

In the cell-based space, Israel-headquartered MeaTech is leveraging 3D bioprinting aims as an industrial process for producing cultivated meat cuts, such as slaughter-free steak or chicken breast. Similarly, Singapore-based Shiok Meat’s use of 3D printing was found to successfully simulate the authentic mouthfeel of shrimp meat in its cell-based analog.

Dr. Specht concludes: “Global governments should recognize that meaningful climate gains from a scaled shift toward plant-based meat will not be achievable in the near term unless they invest soon in open-access R&D and infrastructure for this burgeoning industry.”

By Benjamin Ferrer