Question
Robert Kerr
Do you find that plant-based culinary is on the rise in restaurants within North America finding a more dominant position on the menu? Do you think this will continue to increase in demand? Why?
Answer
So I think to a point, I think that plant-based culinary has definitely, uh, a become more popular than it has. Um, you know, when I went plant-based 28, 29 years ago now, um, I couldn't go to a restaurant and find plant-based options unless it was a side dish. If it was like, you know, french fries or, uh, my wife, you know, has been plant-based as long as I have and we joke about having to go to, you know, like McDonald's and order a burger without the burger on it, right? Um, more like a fast food restaurant and go with our friends and they would just order a normal thing and we would order the bun with the tomato and the ketchup and lettuce. Nowadays it's much easier to be able to find, um, plant-based, uh, options on recipe or on menus. Um, I do some consulting to be able to help, you know, restaurants do that as well too. Um, but yeah, so it's definitely become more popular in the past five years, um, once impossible and beyond kind of started taking off. Um, you know, a lot of investors started looking into the space and it kind of ballooned out quite more than uh, it probably should have. Um, and so what we're seeing right now is a little bit of a recession in the plant-based space too, where people overinvested and now, um, those companies there were just too much in the market. So we saw a ton of stuff that were on. Um, we a ton of stuff that were out in the market. Um, and a lot of times a lot of them didn't survive. You know, there were some pretty cool things that came out of it. Um, mostly there were like meat analogs, you know, so there's a couple different, um, companies like, uh, meat Lee and stuff like that too that came out with like steaks that were, you know, engineered basically and they're plant-based, which is interesting, but that's not really my thing. If you're plant-based, as long as I am you, you know, when you taste something that tastes like meat, you get kind of turned off of it 'cause you're so used to not having meat for so long. Um, so I'm looking for more whole food ingredients anyways. Um, now that being said, uh, because of that surge, more people in the United States are plant-based than they ever have been and more doctors are recommending plant-based recipes at the same time. So we are still seeing a lot of plant-based recipes or plant-based items on menus, which is fantastic. Um, and there's more options and more people are aware of how to cook plant-based now than they ever have been where they can easily make a transition to be able to make it into something that's plant-based. So will it increase in demand? I think it will. I think more people see the health benefits of a plant-based diet. I think that the, uh, a younger generation is more used to plant-based diets now, and my kids have been plant-based their entire lives. Um, and because of that I think that we are going to see that increase in demand over time. I think that just at this exact moment it kind of like went up really, really, really fast and then like the bubble popped and it came down and we're kind of like in this little bit of a slump where it's like not going all the way up, but it's much higher than it was say 30 years ago. So, um, so yeah. Increase in demand Yes. And why has kind of been answered that same way.
