NEWS FROM THE FRONTIER

DEVELOPMENTS DOWN UNDER

• v2food expanded its grocery retail footprint, launching its v2mince and v2burgers at 600 Woolworths stores across Australia.
• IKEA Australia announced the launch of a plant-based version of their iconic Swedish meatballs in Australian stores as “a more sustainable option”.
• Cale Drouin, Founder of Made With Plants, spoke with inside FMCG about the growing interest in flexitarian diets driving the demand for plant-based alternatives.
• Vow collaborated with celebrity chef Neil Perry to showcase dishes featuring six of Vow's cell-cultivated meats, marking an exciting milestone in the company’s journey towards commercialisation.

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS

• The largest UK supermarket Tesco is committing to increase sales of plant-based meat alternatives by 300% as part of a push towards sustainability.
• Start-up Wildtype opened a pre-order list for chefs interested in incorporating their cultivated sashimi-grade salmon on future menus.
• As more food outlets across China offer Beyond Meat, the company seeks to continue its growth in a "vitally important country and market” with plans to build two production facilities near Shanghai.
• Plant-based meat maker Quorn will complete a nutritional review of its products as part of its sustainability commitments, urging food manufacturers to also address growing links between health issues such as obesity and sustainability.

WHY ALTERNATIVE PROTEINS?

A new study published in the journal Nature Sustainability calculated that a global shift to plant-based eating could dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the Earth's atmosphere. The study compared a global average “Busines-As-Usual diet” to a diet that reduces meat intake by 70% (as suggested by the EAT-Lancet Commission, named the “ELC diet”), or one with no animal products (“VGN”). It found that global adherence to the ELC diet by 2050 would remove approximately 332 gigatons CO2 from the atmosphere - which the authors say is equivalent to nine years of fossil fuel emissions - while the VGN diet would remove 547 gigatons CO2, or the equivalent of 16 years of fossil fuel emissions.