Always On: The Meat Alternative Market

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

Today we want to go deep on one brand to explore the meat alternative market. Let’s start by asking MorningConsult.AI for the key brand metrics of Impossible Foods, one of the leading  brands that sells plant-substitute food.

By asking about any brand’s key metrics, MorningConsult.AI quickly spits out an NPS score, purchasing consideration, awareness, favorability, user frequency and more in a matter of seconds. We’re going to go deeper on user frequency in the next section, but first why don’t you give our AI tool a try for yourself? Our new AI tool is available for anyone to try for free. Give it a spin here. Plus, join us for a live demo of our new AI chat platform later this week on Thursday at 2:30 PM ET.

Weekly Users of Impossible Foods

There’s a clear upward trend in weekly users of Impossible Foods dating back to 2018, and we see a notable bump in usage throughout 2023. This may reflect increased retail availability, as Impossible Foods was available in more than 80,000 retail locations globally in 2023. That said, growth has been slower since then and the brand only recently beat its late-2023 peak. Our daily survey asks several questions of each brand we track to understand how consumer perception is shifting over time — learn more here.

Next, let’s dig deeper into who these consumers who are eating Impossible Foods weekly are. We can build a custom audience with our Audience tool. The sample size for the metrics below is 6,384 and is from a two-year period.

Let’s Go Deeper: Who Are the Impossible Foods Users

Impossible Food users are young
26% of these consumers are Gen Z and 42% are millennials. These percentages are far higher compared with the general population. This brand is struggling to find its way into the kitchens of older demographics.

They’re more likely to be men
65% of these consumers are men and just 35% are women.

They’re wealthier
20% of weekly Impossible Foods users make $100k a year or more, which is 4 points higher than the general population. These consumers are also far likely to have more money invested.

They’re far likely to be using meal delivery services and buying groceries online
Nearly seven out of ten of these consumers are using meal delivery services and 81% are buying groceries online

Extra Credit

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Lab-Grown Meat Faces a Culture Clash on the Road to Mainstream Success: In order to achieve widespread adoption with consumers, lab-grown meat must overcome perception issues on multiple fronts

How Gen Z is Eating and Drinking: This report explores Gen Z’s food and beverage preferences, behaviors and expectations. Based on a survey conducted among 1,001 Gen Zers, this report provides insights into how the generation is thinking about and engaging with the food and beverage industry today