Producers of broiler chicken products have no reason to be concerned about the forthcoming launch of Beyond Meat’s plant-based poultry range, the chairman of the Russian National Meat Association said in comforting tones, ignoring forecasts from Deloitte of a 10 per cent growth in the plant-based food sector per year in Russia.

According to Russian magazine Agroinvestor and Poultry World, anonymous sources familiar with the plant-based powerhouse brand Beyond Meat say it will launch its vegan chicken range this summer. However, Sergey Yushin, chairman of the Russian National Meat Association, remained optimistic that it would have little effect on the country’s broiler chicken industry due to what he claims are low numbers of people giving up flesh consumption.

"I believe there will be a wave-like trend with periods when people start to consume more of the surrogate due to its novelty and fashion, then interest will fall as soon as consumers who have tried the alternative meat will return to the animal product," Yushin said, as reported in Poultry World.

Without citing any research on which to base his claims, Yushin said there were more people looking to increase their meat consumption than switch to plant-based alternatives. He added that there would be ‘some temporary growth’ in demand for Beyond Meat’s products, effectively dismissing it as a trend.

Rustam Khafizov, a leading analyst of Russia’s biggest meat producer Cherkizovo, said the plant-based meat sector was not expected to grow over the next 10 years due to consumers being put off by perceived unnatural ingredients, while Sergey Lakhtyukhov, director-general of the Russian Union of Poultry Producers, stated that vegan poultry was all about hype.

However, this sort of baseless conjecture from figures within industry associations tells us that their members are clearly concerned. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and other pioneering plant-based food tech startups have experienced monumental growth in other parts of the world. Increased awareness of the impact of animal agriculture on the environment has prompted a rise in the numbers of people looking to reduce their meat consumption or go plant-based entirely for the range of benefits it brings to personal health, a reduction in the risk of future pandemics and of course reducing animal suffering and needless death.

Russia looks to be no exception, despite what its meat industry’s leading figures are saying, their heads firmly in the sand. According to Forbes, analysts from Deloitte evaluated the alternative meat market in Russia for the first time ever earlier this year and forecast huge potential with around 47 per cent of Russians aged 16-40 ready to add plant-based alternatives to their diets - thanks mainly to interest in Beyond Meat.

“Products made from vegetable proteins have always been found in Russia, but the popularisation of this category of goods is associated with the release of Beyond Meat here,” said Andrei Sizov, director of the SovEkon analytical centre. “The supply of products from this company began to form a new market in Russia. Replacing traditional meat with vegetable is a Western fashion, which has reached our country a few years later ”.

Deloitte forecast growth of the alternative meat sector of 10 per cent per year, with both small startups and large agricultural holdings all pushing the production and roll-out of plant-based products. The only issues it seems are the higher costs of such products compared to the traditional animal-based versions, and lagging behind other regions such as the US and Western Europe.

Beyond Meat has been operating since 2009, but only entered the Russian market a decade later in the spring of 2019. Since then its products have appeared in retail chains including Azbuka Vkusa, Lenta, Utkonos, Garden City and Perekrestok, while Pizza Hut, TGI Fridays and Teremok have all experimented with vegan meat options.

With a TGI Fridays vegan cutlet burger costing a third more than the animal version, and alternative meat products generally costing 4,500-6,000 rubles (EUR 50-65) per kilogram, analysts said that price was the barrier to mass adoption. However, cheaper options produced by domestic startups and holdings are already appearing.

In early 2020, ProVeg International shone a spotlight on Russian startup Greenwise for successfully launching its range of plant-based strips and jerky in 2,000 shops across Russia and releasing promising growth forecasts. Later in the year, Russian agricultural holding EFKO - one of the countries three biggest agro-industrial companies and the largest oil and fat holding in the Eurasian Economic Union - released its first plant-based meat product with a focus on burgers and nuggets.

Also in 2020, food company Efko announced an investment of 100 million rubles (EUR 1.1 million) in the production of soy-based burger patties which can now be bought in stores in and around Moscow for about 1,000 rubles per kilogram - a quarter the cost of the foreign plant-based meats identified by Deloitte as gamechangers.

“The idea of ​​starting the production of vegetable meat is not only a question of a responsible attitude to the environment but also an increase in consumer demand, a question of its active longevity and quality of life,” said Andrey Zyuzin, head of Efko Innovation. “People are concerned about the growth of diseases and allergic reactions, some of which are caused by the excessive presence of growth hormones in traditional meat, as well as antibiotics in the diet of livestock, which inevitably enter the human diet. Consumption is becoming more conscious. After all, more than 60 billion heads of livestock and poultry are slaughtered in the world every year, despite the fact that in general, about 30 per cent of the food produced is thrown away.”

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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