Meat substitutes are growing in popularity so quickly that a run has been created on the vegetable raw materials used for it. Manufacturers and chemical companies provide it Financieele Dagblad price increases for raw materials.
The market for meat substitutes is small compared to that of the meat industry, but is growing rapidly. ABN Amro expects a 10 percent growth in the Netherlands this year. Barclays investment bank believes that the global market for meat substitutes will be ten times bigger in ten years time than it is today.
More than half of the Dutch eat no meat three days a week, the Voedingscentrum said earlier. Food producers respond to this group by simulating meat products such as hamburgers, chicken and minced meat.
Meat substitutes contain proteins. These can be obtained from animal products such as eggs and milk, but also from soy, peas or grains. Because few companies have the right installations to separate vegetable proteins, the market is reaching its limits, according to the producers involved in the FD.
Professor Atze Jan van der Goot of the Wageningen University says he also has signals that this problem will play a role. “Separating protein from, for example, a soybean is a more complicated process than making a meat substitute. That is why it is difficult to expand those factories.”
Substitute long-term opposite effect
It is true that there are shortages, says Jaap Korteweg, founder of The Vegetarian Butcher, but according to him they are only incidental. He does not expect price increases in the supermarket for the time being.
He thinks that more demand for meat substitutes in the long term can lead to a surplus of raw materials. “Simply because for the production of vegetable meat only half or fewer beans and grains are needed than as animal feed in the production of meat.”
“More than 70 percent of the agricultural land is used worldwide for meat production,” he says. “If we were to switch completely to vegetable meat and dairy, we would need less than half of that land.”
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