Plant-based food brands need new language to create and define their categories.

It should come as no surprise that plant-based foods are having a huge moment. In fact, ‘moment’ sounds like an understatement when you look at the explosion of available products, sharp ascent in sales and amount of media coverage these products receive. It’s probably more appropriate to stay that they’re causing a tectonic shift in the food industry and how consumers eat. Daring innovation and ingenuity have expanded both dietary possibilities and flavor palates. Yet, why does a plant-based food brand choose to be categorized as the very food item it set-out not to be—an item it often denigrates in its communications? 

With the rise of plant-based foods, words increasingly matter to those industries threatened by these new foodstuffs. Who has the right to use certain words has become a competitive weapon. There is an increasingly contentious battle between the meat and dairy industries and plant-based food companies that has escalated into the courts, demanding government intervention. Here’s the argument in brief:

• Meat and dairy associations believe consumers are confused by plant-based brands using words, such as milk, burger, cheese and chicken, when qualifying their products as plant-based ‘milk,’ etc. To start, the legal definitions for milk and meat specify that they must come from mammals. Industry also argues that consumer confusion has serious health risks because they may assume a plant-based burger has the same nutrition benefits as a beef-based burger. Interestingly, most of these associations’ largest members routinely use plant-based qualifiers to describe their sausage, cheese and other ‘meaty’ products.
• The plant-based food people counter that the above reasoning is nothing more than competitive bluster to suppress their business. The first study by an independent party to answer the question – Are consumer confused about plant-based foods coming from animals? – overwhelmingly found that they are not. Further, the International Food Information Council found in 2018 that roughly 75% of Americans understood that plant-based milk did not come from cows. 

I’m not writing to weigh-in on this argument or influence your perspective either way. Instead, I propose that plant-based food companies are missing a seminal moment in their development. A moment, coincidentally, that would side-step them from the above controversy. It’s time for these innovative food brands to find new language to describe their revolutionary inventions. 

Familiar words are safe and practical – they can make it easier for consumers to have a sense of what they’re eating, for retailers to know where the products should go in the store, and even for chefs to describe dishes on their menus. But they also limit differentiation by simply co-opting language to define plant-based foods as alternatives to more established, better understood foodstuffs. 

For some plant-based foods, I certainly understand the novelty of realistic imitation to intrigue consumers. My husband and I couldn’t believe how similar our first non-beef ‘burger’ tasted, smelled and appeared to the real thing. Did we love it and begin eating more plant-based foods? YES. Have we jettisoned meat and seafood from our diet? Absolutely not. We, like most plant-based consumers, seek to expand our food choices with the new and unfamiliar. Some people (and brands) argue better nutrition profiles and reduced environmental footprints as purchase motivators for plant-based foods, but the data is mixed or inconsistent. Choice, variety, discovery, experimentation…..these are the motivators with broader appeal.

According to INNOVA Market Insights, consumers are seeking out new food experiences like never before – from unusual flavors and textures to unexplored food types and ethnicities. So, rather than striving for a plant-based analogue of a familiar meat or dairy foodstuff, I believe there is an untapped demand for brands to create and build new categories with new language.

It frees them to push their innovation further, exploring a wider range of ingredients, flavor profiles, textures and applications. It also frees makers of plant-based foods from the entrenched expectations that consumers have for food that may limit their creativity. Education will be critical, like any new food that sparks consumer curiosity. But there’s a long history of inventing new types of food and beverages with familiar ingredients that are reimagined in new formats, shapes or applications to create separate categories.

It’s time for plant-based food companies to carve-out their own place in consumers’ minds (and retailer’s shelves) defined by and exclusively owned by them. Let meat and dairy have words like burger and milk, and channel all the reasons why consumers seek-out and increasingly want alternatives into an exciting new world of food choices.