Sales of Plant-Based ‘Meats’ Continue to Fall

As has been apparent for some time, the blush is off the rose -- or whatever plant processors are using these days to create meat analogues. Newly released figures from Circana (formerly IRI) indicate sales of all plant-based meat alternatives are down 7.4% for the 52 weeks ending July 16. Volume is down even more, -15.6% in unit sales and -13.4% in pounds.

The summer grilling season apparently is mitigating earlier, steeper declines. In dollar sales, frozen meat alternatives decreased only 0.9% in the period, to nearly $751 million, while fresh alt meats were down 19.5%, to $363.6 million. Seafood alternatives fell 6.5% to $10.5 million. All figures compared with the same period last year.

By our math, the overall category has grown to nearly $1.125 billion.

In fresh alt-meats, every category but one saw declines – “ingredient cut alternatives” was up 4%.

Among the 12 categories of frozen, far and away the preferred format, dollar-sales increases were seen by ingredient cut alternatives (+57.9%), wing (+17.7%), sausage (+13.8%), riblets (+6.8%), ground (+4.5%) and strip/cutlet (+2.0%). But they weren’t enough to counter the overall category decline.

Volume sales decreased much faster. Frozen alt-meats were down 10.1% in volume while fresh sunk 21.7%. Seafood declined 17.4%.

But price per volume increased across the board, as it has for nearly all food products. Fresh was up 2.9% per pound, frozen up 10.2% and seafood up 13.2% per pound.