Plant Based World Expo - My Takeaways

AMAZING plant-based smoked salmon and caviar from Konscious

So, having spent the day (19/9/24) at the Plant-based World Expo at Excel London, what are my takeaways..?

* The battle is still waging for best sausage / burger / TVP / plant milk … it’s almost depressing to see that a lot of plant-based development is still relatively generic

* Having said that, there are some truly brilliant products in the room which demonstrate that in some cases the future is already here. The Konscious plant-based smoked salmon, cream cheese and plant-based caviar is genuinely brilliant: a great demonstration of the potential for plant-based to bring both new exciting food experiences and make existing animal ones redundant

* Whilst lots of the products here are really good at a functional performance level, the lack of ‘marketing’ around them will hamper their growth - sadly, lots of the international products here are not aligned well with the UK market / consumer

* The launch by the Vegetarian Society of their new Plant Based trademark could be a real game-changer for flexitarian propositions - it encompasses all the standards of their Vegan Approved standard as well as insisting on a level of plant-based content. There may be some risk of ambiguity around whether this could be misconstrued by consumers to also include hybrid products, but hopefully that will be addressed

* For the time being, the cost structure of the category, especially in the face of heavily subsidised traditional alternatives, remains challenging, but this will certainly improve