Christie Lagally is the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods, a plant-based chicken manufacturing and technology company based in Seattle, Washington.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
The landscape of the alt-meat industry has shifted significantly in recent months. Companies that survived to 2025 were met with funding deserts, hindering their ability to commercialize cutting-edge technologies. Meanwhile, there exists no bridge between tech development and market application to define the path forward.
“It turns out this is a very hard problem to solve,” remarked an investor, referring to the years Rebellyous Foods has dedicated to achieving price parity for plant-based meat through advanced production technology. Ironically, developing the technology was the easy part; real-world deployment is the hard part.
While taste, price, quality, availability, and consumer perception are often cited, market performance of alt-meat products is influenced by a complex web of interacting forces. But they all share a common thread: they oppose change and strongly favor the status quo of animal-meat dominance.
Despite the unhealthiness of pork hot dogs, they remain a staple in public schools, driven by the need to feed 65 million students on shrinking budgets.
Similarly, beef is still served in cardiac hospital wards due to its lower cost compared to plant-based alternatives, even with the imminent risk to patients’ lives. Globally, intensive farming operations continue to increase meat production, posing an immediate threat of deadly bird flu pandemics that could claim more lives than COVID.
Size matters
Besides the production of soy and corn, which also fuel the meat industry, global meat production is the largest single food source in the world. With a per capita consumption of 94 pounds annually, equivalent to a quarter-pound hamburger daily, global meat production has reached far beyond the predictions of “peak meat” and continues to rise.
The sheer volume of this industry allows large meat companies to easily absorb waste and withstand setbacks due to their inherent momentum. In stark contrast, alternative meat companies are vulnerable to even minor disruptions. A single listeria outbreak, product recall, or mislabeled package, which would be mere blips for large meat producers, can spell extinction for smaller alt-meat businesses.
Size matters, as larger ships are generally better equipped to weather the proverbial ocean storms and survive macroeconomic events.
Time matters
The modern meat industry has a century-long advantage in developing and sustaining its momentum. During this period, every aspect of protein production—from supply chains and equipment design to processing lines—was optimized for converting animals into meat products. The foundational infrastructure of our industrial food system is entirely centered on animal protein.
Companies attempting to give consumers other options, particularly price competitive ones, are not just challenging consumer choices, but also the global meat supply chain. The time spent building our modern meat processing industry has been optimized only for animal-meat production, not alt-meat.
Challenging even one of these aspects of the status quo is hard enough but breaking through to get to market means challenging them all at once. While this is achievable, time is a scarce commodity for alt-meat companies relying on venture capital with 5-10 year returns, especially compared to the 50-100 year returns enjoyed by meat companies.
The comfort zone
The strongest force of the status quo is the will of the people. The availability and familiarity of meat make it comfortable and easy so consumers choose it despite the drawbacks of personal or planetary health.
But it’s not just consumers who want to stay in their comfort zone. Food industry investors don’t see the alt-meat industry as an overnight success, and rightfully so. The recent decade of sudden growth in alt-meat was built on the belief that the meat industry was ripe for disruption, which it still is.
However, unlike the clear transition from landlines to cell phones, most modern industries lack the scale of the conventional meat industry.
So how do alt-meat companies compete against the almighty status quo? Our job is to build, sustain and grow the greatest profitable companies with the best products to take market share with alt-meat’s better intrinsic options. Here are a few ways to do that:
Size vs. turning radius
Yes, size matters, but it’s not the only way to buffer the impact of storms. To extend the ship analogy, alt-proteins can’t become big overnight, but they can garner a better turning radius to avoid the storms or take waves head-on.
Turning radius is the ability and the willingness to pivot quickly when current strategy is worn out or just wrong. It’s a mind set to consider the third and fourth options and not dig in on principle. It’s a commitment to trying products in the market, seeing if they work, and adapting as the market dictates. Big companies do this too, but small ones often have the agility to do this better.
Better turning radius also means alt-meat companies can, and should, be more financially conservative to reserve fuel to go around the storm. Once, I had an investor admonish me for “not spending money fast enough.” But when the hard times came, we were ready to batten down the hatches and weather the storm.
Compressing time advantages
Time in the market is an advantage because, if you survive, it leads to momentum, a major component of the status quo. Time allows for growth and product refinement, optimized quality and refined supply chains. Alt-meat cannot skip these steps!
However, we can optimize the use of time for maximum momentum creation. For alt-meat companies, especially those tackling tough R&D or capital projects, they should utilize an agile or scrum methodology to deliver consistent results.
Finally, alt-meat companies need to plan for compressed timeframes to market. While the status quo is built on a century of meat production, most of it was undirected. Today’s modern meat industry is largely based on technology from the 1960’s, albeit recent decades have seen rapid adoption of mechanization and software optimization.
Alt-meat can avoid that transition to today’s sub-par production standards by building the production system for the future. Innovation around production technology and software assisted product development are good places to start.
Go looking for the comfort zone
Consumers are comfortable with conventional animal meat and find it challenging to choose alternatives. The goal of alt-meat companies is to offer identical products but made or sourced differently. Simply said, we are “meeting consumers where they are at.” But are we really?
Beyond taste, several factors deter consumers from embracing alt-meat. These include price disparities and inconvenient packaging sizes, such as needing to purchase 10 small packages for a barbecue instead of one large one. Food service providers face similar challenges with serving alt-meat products at scale. In fact, the vast majority of alt-meat’s potential customers are limiting their consumption based on price objections alone.
These details define the comfort zone that consumers seek, either consciously or unconsciously, and companies need to seek and repeat detailed examinations of all reasons why consumers do and don’t choose alternatives. Alt-meat can make inroads by very quickly testing products in the market and pivoting quickly without bias.
Almighty or just timely?
The seeming omnipotence of the status quo may be debatable. While meat has been a dietary staple since the dawn of humanity, it was consumed in limited quantities by a much smaller global population. The intensification of modern meat production only began after WWII, and some ubiquitous products, like chicken nuggets, have an even shorter history.
So the size and time advantages of modern animal meat production may not be so intractable, and the comfort zone can be redefined with quality products that change with a strong, intentional link to consumer feedback.
The impact of alt-meat to change the trajectory of human protein sources is well within our grasp when we can optimize to be nimble, fast-moving, and consumer responsive companies.
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