Sales of plant-based meat alternatives have been declining since 2023. Beyond Meat posted a $112 million net loss in the last quarter of 2025, is trying to mop up more than $800 million in debt, and its share price is flirting with the floor.

The dominant diagnosis: these products are ultra-processed, suspected of being bad for your health, and often more expensive than the meat they claim to replace.

Translation: we asked consumers to give up a steak… in order to pay more for an imitation steak, with an ingredient list as long as your arm, one that is neither better for them nor — let's be honest — always very good.

Hard to imagine why it's struggling.

First, some respect

Let's be clear, because this is a serious subject: animal welfare is not a whim. It's a legitimate issue, and the thoughtful advocates of that cause are right to carry it. Eating less meat, better produced, is a direction I believe is right.

That is precisely why what follows bothers me. Because the best way to sabotage a just cause is to defend it with bad products. You convert no one with a sermon served cold on a disappointing plate.

The meat-cosplay problem

The industry made a strange bet: to convince people to quit meat, let's imitate meat. Perfectly. The beetroot-juice “bleed,” the sizzle, the fibre, the colour that browns as it cooks.

The result? The uncanny valley, barbecue edition. A product that spends its whole time apologising for not being the thing it copies — and which we therefore judge, inevitably, on the one ground where it can never win: the taste of meat.

And to manufacture that illusion, you need ambitious chemistry. Twenty, thirty ingredients to mimic a food that has only one. We flee the “processed”… and land in the ultra-processed. We go looking for health… and end up with a label we can't read.

The vegetable, in all this, plays an extra in disguise. A towering actor handed a lousy part.

What works — and never apologised

Here's the irony everyone can see: the plant-based dishes that have been hits for centuries never tried to be meat.

Hummus doesn't pretend. Falafel has no complex about itself. Dahl, miso, ratatouille, a chickpea curry, a good plate of roasted vegetables with tahini: no one, ever, has thought “this is nice, but it's missing beef.”

They are delicious as themselves. Headliners — not a rough cover of someone else's hit. That is the whole difference between a cover band and an artist. One imitates, the other creates. And in the long run, the market always pays for creation.

Breaking the codes: form, origin, texture

So let's stop the pastiche. Plant-based food doesn't need to look like a steak. It needs to be good, and to be itself. Two principles are enough to steer all product development.

Be delicious. Non-negotiable. If it isn't good, nothing else counts — not the ethics, not the carbon, not the storytelling. Pleasure is the only durable way in.

Be nutritionally interesting. Not “less bad than meat.” Genuinely interesting: protein density, fibre, micronutrients, a short and readable ingredient list. A product you're proud to turn over and read the back of.

And to get there, let's break the codes on three fronts:

  • Form. Why a “burger,” a “sausage,” a “nugget”? These are shapes designed for meat. Let's invent our own.
  • Origin. Let's get off the soy-wheat-pea loop. Forgotten pulses, mushrooms and mycoproteins, fermentations, seaweed, oilseeds, ancient grains.
  • Texture. Let's stop chasing the “tender-and-fibrous” of meat. Crunchy, melting, creamy, gelled, puffed: hundreds of desirable plant textures that owe nothing to the animal.

The real question

The decline of fake steak is not the end of plant-based. It is the end of a bad idea: selling plant-based as an ersatz, a consolation prize, meat with the meat taken out.

Those who defend animal welfare deserve better than a mediocre product waved like a banner. And the consumer won't change out of guilt. They will change out of appetite.

The next plant-based revolution won't look like meat. It will have the good taste of looking like nothing you know — and of being, quite simply, better.

Colleagues in food R&D and marketing: in 2026, do we keep dressing the pea up as a steak — or do we finally write it its own part?