Veganism in trouble - and the man who sold half a million steaks with a 12,000-year-old idea to fix it

26 March 2025, 12:14 | Updated: 26 March 2025, 14:36

Reading death threats sent by vegan "fundamentalists" was Neil Rankin's first introduction to plant-based food.

The Cordon Bleu-trained chef had just opened a nose-to-tail barbecue restaurant, Temper, in 2016 when he became the target of so much abuse he deleted his social media accounts.

Eight years and half a million steaks later, he's running a vegan food company, Symplicity, and has a message for the rest of the stuttering plant-based industry: None of it tastes very good - and he has a 12,000-year-old cooking technique to fix it.

"It's crap. It is. Most of the stuff in the supermarket is terrible," says Rankin, 48, who has worked in Michelin-star restaurants run by the likes of Gary Rhodes and Nuno Mendez.

"It needs more chefs and less food manufacturers: Most of those people are pretty shit at cooking."

After five years of rapid growth, the plant-based industry has flatlined since 2021 and in 2023 the appetite for vegan products shrunk.

Unit sales of plant-based food in the UK fell by 9.9% between 2022 and 2023, according to the Good Food Institute, driven by declining interest in chilled desserts, ready meals and meat alternatives.

Businesses have responded in kind. In 2023, trade magazine The Grocer reported the number of meat alternatives on sale in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Waitrose shrunk by 10%.

"Zero sales growth led to lots and lots of disappointment from investors and lots and lots of adverse publicity in the financial community," says Andrew Godley, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Sussex.

"That's absolutely, categorically unambiguous. That's clear. What we don't know is why the market has switched from several years of very rapid growth to these three or four years of flat growth."

The ultra-processed problem

Rankin believes he has the answer: "None of it tastes very good."

He says products are too processed because manufacturers are too focused on making "a good idea cheaper" and supermarkets are insistent on "crazy price margins".

Their preoccupation with imitating meat has also forced them into "weird corners of chemistry" to replicate its texture, or even blood.

Indy Kaur, the founder of market research and strategy company Plant Futures Collective, says a lot of the investment in meat alternatives comes from the technology industry, which has underestimated how much "richness" is lost without chefs.

"There's just a lot of nervousness and scepticism with consumers about this category within the tech space. It is something that businesses really need to check in on."

She says new customers trialling meat alternatives stop "after any bad taste experiences".

But it is important not to overestimate industry decline, she adds, with year-on-year sales comparisons becoming less reliable since 2020 due to a pandemic spike that has since petered out.

The cash value of plant-based food sales increased by 9% between 2020 and 2021, before declining by 3% in 2022 and 2.8% in 2023, according to the Good Food Institute.

Sophie Gordon, 32, a private chef and author of vegan cookbook The Whole Vegetable, says the number of her clients ticking "vegan" as a dietary requirement has halved since the pandemic.

This is because they have become "hyper-aware" of how their food is made and "a lot of the vegan products" are highly processed.

Part of the problem is machine manufacturing at scale, something Ms Gordon had to contend with when she took her own brand, Dust Granola, to factory.

"I had to change the whole recipe because...the machine physically couldn't make the recipe I could make at home."

The new technology problem

Professor Godley, who has published papers on the poultry, agribusiness and meat alternatives sectors, disagrees that flatlining sales are the fault of the industry, retailers or their products.

Instead, most consumers just don't understand plant-based alternatives or their health benefits.

"'What is the point of an alternative meat?' is going to be the question that most people would ask."

As a result, plant-based sales have behaved more like a product in the technology industry than the food industry, he says.

When new tech goes on sale for the first time (think CDs or personal computers), knowledgeable consumers rush to shops and drive an initial growth spike: in this case, they were vegans and vegetarians.

Meanwhile, the majority of customers initially "don't get it", causing a pause or decline in growth before they realise the technology's benefits and get on board, he says.

This would make it only a matter of time and marketing before growth resumes.

But according to Plant Futures' Kaur, there is a growing movement in the industry to recognise the meat alternatives that satisfy vegans and vegetarians do not necessarily satisfy the preferences and motivations of most customers.

Plant-based companies must innovate - and perhaps fail before they succeed - to cross this "chasm" between the two groups, she says.

And it seems like imitations are on the out, and the indulgent and artisanal are in.

Vegan chocolate and cookies are performing well, she says, with brands like Nomo seeing double-digit growth.

Unit sales of plant-based cheeses rose 4% in the UK between 2022 and 2023, according to the Good Food Institute Europe, while cream was up almost 10%.

And while meat alternative unit sales were down 11.9%, mushroom supplements, tofu and tempe are ticking up.

A 12,000-year-old solution?

It's a shift towards Rankin's vision for the industry.

He believes the solution to its problems lies in sourcing ingredients locally, using every part of each vegetable, and, crucially, fermentation.

It is one of the oldest forms of food processing, with experts estimating the method was first used between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago.

"Fermentation is the key for taking something that tastes kind of ordinary and okay into something that's exceptional."

At his vegan burger company, he takes beetroots for sweetness, mushrooms for density and onions for meatiness and ferments them in Japanese soy sauce in a method similar to kimchi for 15 days.

Read more:
Britain's shrinking families: An economic 'timebomb'
Why being single costs thousands more each year
All the latest consumers news from the Money Blog

The whole vegetables are minced in a meat grinder and mixed with miso added for umami flavour and flax seeds to emulsify, all to produce a dough that is steamed, baked and moulded into different products.

"It's weird to people because it looks f***ing different," he laughs.

"The main thing is we're not trying to make it look like meat or taste like meat."

Just a few years after setting up his business, Rankin supplies restaurants across the country including Dishoom and Gordon Ramsay Street Burger, and has endorsements on his website from chef Tom Kerridge and Professor Tim Spector.

Open omnivores

His idea could be the kind of innovation Kaur hopes will propel the plant-based industry back into growth.

But for that to happen, the industry needs to win over a group beyond vegans and vegetarians - and it has its eyes set on "open omnivores".

These are meat-eaters the industry thinks will be receptive to new innovations if they can be convinced they are wrong to believe lots of meat and dairy is nutritionally necessary.

"That's one of the biggest barriers that we've got in the plant-based sector at the minute, overcoming entrenched beliefs around food and nutrition," she says.

"As soon as we cross the chasm, hit open omnivores, that's when we're going to start seeing the meat-alt market back into growth."

(c) Sky News 2025: Veganism in trouble - and the man who sold half a million steaks with a 12,000-year-old idea to fix it