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From burgers to sausages, the meatless revolution is in full swing. Meat analogues also known as meat substitutes or mock meat, mimic the color, taste, and texture of meat. The global meat analogue market size was worth $5,477.7 million in 2020, and is expected to reach $11,230.1 million by 2030, with a CAGR of 7.6% from 2021 to 2030.
To understand which companies are driving innovation in the industry, we conducted a study in PatSeer. We used the Quality vs. Quantity – Top Assignees chart that incorporates the 360° score (the average of citation, legal, market quality and document scores) against the patent portfolio size to represent our results. The chart organizes the key companies into 4 quadrants – challengers (top-left), leaders (top-right), marginal players (bottom-left), and underachievers (bottom-right).
Insights:
- Nestle has been the leader in meat analogue production and has been pursuing an acquisition strategy. They have filed patents for the preparation and color of meat analogue products. The company recently announced a new plant-based college dining program in partnership with Wholesome Crave and the University of Massachusetts, that was intended to be a space to ideate and test new opportunities, recipes, and approaches to successfully accelerate the adoption of more plant-based options amongst existing and new partners.
- Unilever Group, Procter & Gamble, and DuPont are market challengers. Unilever has filed patents for the preparation and flavor of meat analogue products. They acquired The Vegetarian Butcher in 2020 and have been expanding their patent portfolio with greater aggression and increasing global coverage in recent years. This also mirrors their global market expansion plans in this area.
- Another challenger, General Mills, has invested money in the meat analogue startup Everything Legendary which intends to expand to other countries from their US home market.
- There are 2 highly prominent market challengers – Bayer AG and Impossible Foods Inc. Bayer AG had record high sales for soybean, corn and cereal seeds. They have been monitoring the meat analogue market and might become a protein source provider. Impossible Foods Inc recently launched 3 meat analogue products: Impossible™ Chicken Tenders, Impossible™ Spicy Chicken Nuggets and Impossible™ Spicy Chicken Patties further cementing its global presence in 45,000+ locations in the US and 8 countries (Australia, Singapore, etc).
- Meat and poultry company Cargill Inc has partnered with startup CUBIQ Foods that specializes in innovative fat technologies for making meat analogues more flavorful, juicy and textured like animal meat which reflect in its patents on methods for preparing fat compositions and making food items using it with the priority year ranging from 2019 onwards. They have also filed patents on pigment compositions for meat analogues that use coral.
Conclusion
The data clearly shows that multinational companies like Nestle and Unilever are dominating the meat analogue market. Smaller players like Impossible Foods Inc are also becoming a force to reckon with.
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