The Plant-Based Market Is Growing Up, Not Giving Up

The plant-based market is not dying. It is correcting, stabilising, and growing up.

A new report from Systemiq and ProVeg argues that UK retailers are still treating plant-based protein like a novelty aisle experiment, even though the numbers say otherwise. The assessed plant-based protein share is projected to rise from 14% in 2025 to 29% by 2040, with chilled meat and seafood substitutes already growing again from 2024 to 2025. So much for the “nobody wants this stuff” narrative. The report makes one point supermarkets should find impossible to ignore: consumers are not the only force shaping what people eat. Retailers are. Shelf space shapes habits. Promotions shape habits. Own-label ranges shape habits. Price shapes habits.

Processed animal flesh is not popular in a vacuum. It is normalised, subsidised, advertised, discounted, placed everywhere, and sold under comforting supermarket branding. That is not consumer freedom. That is a food system arranged around animal exploitation.

The own-label gap says everything. Private label accounts for 82% of processed meat sales, but only 15% of meat and seafood substitute sales. In other words, supermarkets know exactly how to make animal products cheap, visible, familiar, and convenient. They simply have not applied the same seriousness to plant-based food.

Now the price argument is falling apart too. Madre Brava’s analysis found that meat prices have risen sharply across Germany, Spain, and the UK since 2019, with beef seeing increases of up to 56% in the UK. In Germany and the UK, plant-based meat alternatives have gone from being more expensive than processed meat in 2019 to cheaper by 2025.

The old excuse was that plant-based food was too expensive. Increasingly, the truth is that animal-based food is too unstable. That instability is not random. Animal agriculture is land-hungry, feed-hungry, water-hungry, climate-exposed, disease-prone, and politically protected. It takes living beings, turns them into units of production, and then expects the public to pay more for the privilege of pretending this is normal.

Beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh, seitan, nuts, and plant-based alternatives are not strange. What is strange is building an entire retail system around breeding, confining, killing, processing, packaging, and promoting animals when cheaper, healthier, lower-impact options already exist.

The report also projects that protein diversification could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and freshwater use by 13% to 16% against business as usual, while increasing fibre intake and delivering major health benefits.

Retailers do not need to “respond to demand” like passive bystanders. They create demand every day. The question is not whether plant-based food has a future. The question is why supermarkets are still investing so much effort in keeping animal exploitation on special offer.