Nearly seven years ago, I wrote this piece making the case against blended plant-based meat, and the context matters. Plant-based was in rapid ascent at the time, seemingly an unstoppable force, and my argument was essentially that blending was an unnecessary compromise when the pure plant-based proposition was gaining so much momentum. That framing made sense then, but the world looks different now.
In Belgium, one in four burgers sold at Lidl is now a blended patty made from 60% beef and 40% plant protein. Lidl Netherlands has cut prices on its hybrid beef by 33%. Albert Heijn launched 15 blended protein products in 2025 alone.
These products go by several names: balanced proteins, blended meat, hybrid meat. I’ll use them interchangeably, but the working definition comes from Food System Innovations (FSI), the nonprofit that tracks this category most closely: meat products where at least 30% of the animal-based ingredients are substituted with plants, cultivated cells, or fermentation-derived proteins.
If you’ve read my earlier writing on this category, you know I’ve been skeptical. But my thinking has evolved, and it’s worth working through that in public, with the caveats intact.
Why was I against blended meat in the first place?
Some readers assumed my skepticism came from vegan purism, that I wanted hybrid products to fail because they weren't plant-based enough. That's an odd read for someone who has been openly willing to consider the merits of chicken over beef on environmental grounds, and who has spent years on the Eat For The Planet podcast keeping an open mind on solutions I didn’t personally agree with. I’ve always been focused on outcomes, not ideology.
My skepticism was never about purity but about the customer. Who are they, and why should they care? I'll also say this upfront: it would be intellectually inconsistent not to revisit my position when the evidence warrants it, even if the conclusion isn't a full reversal. So let me walk through what's changed, and what hasn't.
What the data actually shows
The Balanced Proteins: State of the Category 2025 report from FSI is the most comprehensive snapshot of this space we have. 65 companies globally are now operating in this space, over $60 million has been invested since 2023, and the estimated U.S. market opportunity is $5.3 billion, roughly the size of the frozen pizza category.
The institutional foodservice numbers are where it gets interesting. According to FSI, Disneyland has introduced 50/50 Foods’ Both Burger across its kids’ meal program. UCLA converted its entire ground beef supply to a 60/40 blend. Vanderbilt replaced nearly all of its ground beef and projects saving over 800 tons of CO2 in a single academic year. Olijck Foods’ Halfway Burger was served to 29,000 people at the Dutch Grand Prix on a 50/50 formulation over three days, and most diners didn’t notice.
I’ve written before about how context does more work than persuasion, how supply-side decisions reshape what people eat without requiring them to change their values or habits. The beef-to-chicken shift over the last fifty years didn’t happen because consumers decided white meat aligned with their principles. It happened because chicken got cheap and ubiquitous, and the defaults changed. Balanced protein in institutional settings is operating on exactly that logic. When someone orders a burger at a university cafeteria or a theme park, they’re not making a values statement; they’re just eating lunch. The kitchen has already made the decision upstream, and the outcome happens without anyone’s identity being touched or anyone being asked to care.
The foodservice potential alone is reason enough to take this category seriously: the emissions reductions at institutional scale, the procurement logic, the ability to change what millions of people eat without anyone being asked to make a conscious choice. My skepticism is specifically about retail, and that distinction matters.
Where the consumer data gets tricky
The same FSI report contains numbers that should give anyone in this category pause. Consumer interest in hybrid products ranges from 25% to 74% depending entirely on how you frame the concept. The leading motivator for trying balanced protein is curiosity, which is a weak foundation for repeat purchase, and the top barrier is “no clear reason to buy,” which means the category hasn’t yet articulated a value proposition that sticks.
As I wrote in The Alternative Protein Space Doesn’t Get People, the disclosure problem is real. In blind tastings, people like blended products fine, but once they know what’s in them, enthusiasm tends to drop. That’s not a packaging problem. It’s a signal about how deeply meat is embedded in habit, identity, and ritual in ways that don’t respond well to logical arguments or even good taste.
Perdue Chicken Plus is worth holding up as a genuine proof of concept, having held shelf continuously since 2016, which in this category qualifies as remarkable. Tim Dale, Category Innovation Director - Balanced Proteins, at Food System Innovations, made exactly this point in the comments of my recent piece on regenerative scaling: when the value proposition is clear and tangible, these products can stick. Chicken Plus works because it leads with a quarter cup of vegetables per serving in something kids already love, a real parent problem solved in a familiar format. Whether the broader category can find equivalent clarity is still an open question.
Michael Fox at Fable shared something worth including here after that piece ran. In FSI’s blind taste test study, Fable’s Shiitake Infused Beef burger outscored a 100% beef burger on taste, but more interesting than the taste data is what happened at retail: when placed side by side, a “Shiitake Infused Beef Burger” outsells a “100% Beef Burger” in real world conditions. The consumer still reads it as a beef burger, just one elevated with a premium ingredient they already recognize from coffee, wellness products, and restaurant menus. The framing isn’t “we replaced some of your beef.” It’s “we made your beef better,” and that’s a conversation that doesn’t require the consumer to make any concessions.
The retail economics nobody wants to talk about
Meat is one of the hardest categories in grocery in which to build a brand, and not because of consumer attitudes. I know this from experience.
Conventional ground beef runs on razor-thin margins. Retailers stock it to drive traffic, not profit, and any product asking for a premium needs a legible reason for the consumer to pay it, sustained long enough to build habit. Organic and grass-fed beef have been making that case for over a decade and still represent a small fraction of total volume. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are instructive here, and I say this with genuine respect for what they built. They made plant-based protein a mainstream conversation and got into McDonald's and Burger King, but building that awareness cost billions and neither has found a clear path to profitability. Breaking through in the meat case is extraordinarily capital-intensive even when you have a clear, emotionally resonant story. "Made from plants" is a legible idea people can picture and decide whether they're in or out. "Contains 30% plant protein" reads more like a disclosure.
Most companies building in balanced protein don’t have anything close to that capital, and unlike Beyond and Impossible, they can’t rely on a motivated consumer segment actively seeking them out. The US market remains “slowly finding its footing” compared to Europe, and the European wins are happening largely through private-label retailers with scale and pricing flexibility that most emerging brands don’t have.
There is, however, a more interesting business model hiding in plain sight. Companies like Fable and Better Meat Co aren’t trying to build consumer brands in the meat case. They’re ingredient suppliers working with the incumbents who already have the distribution, the shelf space, and the consumer trust. Better Meat Co’s Rhiza mycoprotein, made through fermentation and approved by both the FDA and USDA for inclusion in animal meat, is a compelling example. It’s the ingredient behind Perdue Chicken Plus, and the company has signed supply agreements with major meat producers across North America, Latin America, and Asia. If you can supply the ingredient that helps a major processor quietly reformulate their ground beef, you don’t need to solve the brand-building problem at all. You just need to solve the ingredient problem, and that’s a fundamentally different and arguably more realistic path to scale.
What plant-based should have taught us
The plant-based category didn’t stumble because the products were bad or the mission was wrong. Its momentum slowed, sales retreated, and it hasn’t lived up to the initial hype, largely because it made a specific set of structural mistakes that balanced protein is at risk of repeating.
The first was confusing velocity for adoption. The pandemic surge looked like a cultural shift, but it was largely driven by people stocking up during lockdowns and experimenting when they had more time to cook. When life normalized, the consumers who were never truly converted went back to what they knew, leaving the category with a loyal niche that had always looked bigger than it actually was. Institutional wins in balanced protein are real and meaningful, but a university kitchen switching to a 60/40 blend tells you something important about procurement logic and very little about whether a consumer in a grocery aisle on a Tuesday evening will reach for something unfamiliar when the familiar option is right next to it.
The second was mistaking distribution for adoption. Plant-based got into McDonald’s and Burger King and the industry called it arrival, but when promotional support pulled back and novelty faded, velocity dropped and listings followed. The Disneyland placement and the Dutch Grand Prix are exciting, but they are foodservice wins in captive environments, and the harder test is whether any of this translates to sustained retail pull.
The third is the survey problem. Consumer interest in balanced protein ranges from 25% to 74% depending entirely on how you frame the concept, which tells you less about demand and more about how sensitive acceptance is to context and framing. Plant-based learned this the hard way: people who expressed interest didn’t necessarily buy, and people who bought didn’t necessarily keep buying. The right conditions in a survey are not the conditions in a grocery aisle, and that gap is where most of these categories go to get humbled.
The structural lessons are available to anyone paying attention, but only useful if the sector is willing to apply them honestly rather than citing the favorable data points and hoping the rest works itself out.
Where I actually land
Balanced protein can make a meaningful impact, particularly in institutional and foodservice channels where procurement decisions happen upstream of consumer choice. The emissions math at that scale is real, and the European retail data, particularly what Lidl has pulled off in Belgium, suggests there is a path to broader adoption when pricing is competitive, placement is prominent, and the product doesn’t ask anyone to make a statement.
But when it comes to retail, the signal that really matters isn’t which startup brands are launching. It’s whether the major meat companies decide to move, and more importantly, whether they stick with it. Applegate, owned by Hormel, was the first major meat brand to launch a blended product at national retail, with their Great Organic Blend Burger in 2019, followed by the Well Carved line in 2020. Tyson launched its Raised & Rooted blended burger the same year, with the CEO declaring alternative protein could “someday be a billion-dollar business.” Both generated real attention, neither became a category-defining product, and Tyson quietly discontinued its blended burger while Applegate’s Well Carved line faded without fanfare. If those companies couldn’t make it work with all their resources and shelf relationships, that tells you something important about how hard this actually is. The question now is whether the ingredient supplier model changes that calculus, whether a Fable or a Better Meat Co supplying directly into a major processor’s existing lines, invisibly, without a new brand or a new SKU to market, is the version of this that finally sticks.
Which raises a question I haven’t seen answered convincingly: if Perdue Chicken Plus has been on shelf since 2016 and does well by most accounts, why hasn’t Perdue launched more products in this format? The category got attention, the majors tried their own versions, and then quietly retreated. Something about the business case isn’t as compelling as the narrative suggests, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than assuming the next wave will be different without understanding why the last one stalled.
As for startup consumer brands, the most plausible path for new entrants is probably the natural, organic, and specialty set, leading with flavor, culinary credibility, and ingredient storytelling. Carnéa is an early-stage brand worth watching, with a Michelin-starred chef leading with truffle mushroom meatballs and shiitake burgers rather than carbon footprint messaging. 50/50 Foods takes a similar approach with their Both Burger, pairing grass-fed beef with roasted mushrooms and caramelized onions. Both are betting that flavor and culinary elevation can do what sustainability messaging couldn’t, and that’s a smarter frame than what the first wave tried. Whether it’s enough to build a durable retail brand at meaningful scale is still very much an open question.
The underlying logic of the category is sound, and there are real reasons for optimism, particularly in institutional channels and the B2B ingredient supplier model. But I want this category to succeed because the evidence suggests it will make a meaningful positive impact on emissions, land use, and how we feed people at scale, and the history of this space is littered with categories that mistook early enthusiasm for durable demand and hyped themselves into a credibility problem they never recovered from. Balanced protein deserves better than that. The opportunity is real, but unlocking it will require honesty about the barriers rather than magical thinking about the tailwinds.
What I keep returning to is something bigger than any of this. The most durable food system change doesn’t happen through better products alone. It happens at the level of culture, behavior, and the defaults embedded in the places people already eat, not through persuasion or better packaging, but through the structural work of making better options the path of least resistance before anyone calls it a choice. Plant-rich eating remains, by most meaningful measures, the most impactful long-term direction for food systems, and that hasn’t changed. What interests me most right now is how we actually get there, through behavioral science, through cultural infrastructure, through embedding better defaults into existing food environments. That’s the work Plantega is grounded in, and the foundation I want to build on as I think about what this space needs next.
Balanced protein, at its best, points in the same direction. I just think we need to be careful not to oversell the journey before we’ve honestly mapped the terrain.
Changing defaults without asking anyone to make a values statement, or even care about the why, is exactly the kind of pragmatic win that actually moves the needle on animal suffering. No persuasion required, the kitchen just made a different call upstream.
Good stuff. Thanks for the honest take.
Thanks for sharing, Nil! Love this article and completely agree.
There is a real opportunity for balanced burgers to be the default in different institutional and noncommercial foodservice settings so long as the products taste better, cost less, and maintain trust.
And I agree that retail is a much tougher channel. Things are working in Europe also because many retailers are committed to ambitious climate targets and EU regulations currently allow for softer back-of-pack communication. We'll see how things shake out in the EU as product labeling regulations are in the spotlight.
I can be a bit bullish when it comes to balanced proteins, but I share your concern that we should be clear-eyed about this category. A delisting anywhere is a setback everywhere. That's why, as a category, we need to ruthlessly pursue product taste and price superiority vs conventional meat and dairy. Balanced products take a big step towards closing the taste gap with conventional meat and dairy, and some products, like Fable, are already outperforming conventional meat. But as a whole, the category still has work to do.