I love a good burger. I’m into my fourth decade covering food and, through the years, have witnessed some truly amazing burger alchemy. While each component of a burger can make or break it—from the right cheese and condiments to toppings and bun—the beef grind, handling, and preparation are instrumental to success.
Burger affinities aside, I also try to eat the proverbial rainbow, aiming for daily intake of various fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and other plant-based wonders of nature. I’ve flirted with a vegetarian diet here and there, but always squarely landed in the middle, that still-omnivorous “flexitarian” category—a space guided by voluntary dietary discernment that’s easy to occupy.
My first Gardenburger experience back in the 1980s was memorable. It was a garden, but—in my raging, omnivorous, teenage mind—the only burger quality it held was its general shape. It was earthy, clearly nutritious, and genuine. What you see is what you get. It pioneered the path that led to today’s growing category of plant-based eating, with enough mainstream appeal to help propel it forward but primarily serving as a category anchor for vegetarians.
We are what we eat in more ways than one. Every individual carves their own path through our prevailing foodways. I was raised by Depression-hardened, practical, Midwestern, meat-and-potatoes omnivores, and summertime burgers on the grill were commonplace. But my mom (a wonderful baker) worked at our local health-food store and understood the power of plant-based eating. Happily, I got the best of both worlds.
By the time the 1990s rolled around, Gardenburger got some national competition from Boca burgers—a seemingly meaty product that started finding its way into my grocery cart with regularity. My wife and I regularly had meatless meals, and Boca offered a plant-based burger that leaned heavily on the burger end of the equation that appealed to our sensibilities.
Fast-forward about three decades to the blissfully unaware days of early 2019: The first plant-based burger that genuinely tricked my taste buds was the Impossible Whopper from Burger King. Impossible Foods was a game changer, raising the bar for the meaty end of plant-based eating. Since then, formulators have continued to improve their meat mimicry across the animal protein analogue spectrum.
Nectar, a nonprofit supporting plant-based eating, conducts an annual analysis of available analogue products, and has found people increasingly cannot discern differences between “real” chicken, beef, pork, and seafood and plant-based analogue counterparts. We also continue to hear more about the potential for “balanced proteins,” which combine both meat and plant-based ingredients to improve nutritional profiles and reduce environmental impact (see “The sneaky way even meat lovers can lessen their climate impact,” Grist, June 2025).
Throughout my life, I’ve had friends here and there who abstain from eating meat for a variety of reasons. Some, who have omnivore roots and have a contextual frame of reference for meat, appreciate products that simulate “the real thing.” Others—especially those who have never eaten meat for religious reasons—have less interest in plant-based products that aspire toward real-meat sensibilities.
Plant-based meat alternatives are at an inflection point in their maturation. As noted in the 2026 “Plant-Based Meats Report” from our sister publication The National Provisioner, unit and dollar sales in the category are down. According to the 2026 “Power of Meat” report from the Meat Institute and FMI, refrigerated plant-based meat alternative sales declined by over 11% over the past year. Frozen products have seen less of a decline, but certainly a noticeable plateau.
But it’s a wider plateau today than a decade ago, with more expansion in store. The size of animal protein alternatives category has nearly doubled over the past decade, as noted by the Good Food Institute, reporting that the U.S. retail market for plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy, and eggs has grown from $3.9 billion in 2017 to $7.9 billion in 2025 (“U.S. retail market insights for the plant-based industry”). The market for these foods is projected to double again before 2030.
We regularly work with Innova Market Insights to provide perspectives on ongoing and emerging consumer and category trends, and regular Prepared Foods contributor Lu Ann Williams, global insights director, has suggested it’s time for meat alternatives to stand on their own merits, to build their own “authenticity.” These products also increasingly get the clean and simplified labeling treatment, with Innova noting that over half of recent plant-based product introductions carrying clean-label positioning—a penetration rate for clean label twice as high as the rest of food and beverage. “In true plant-based products, as well as meat substitutes and dairy alternatives, new product launches include natural ingredients, nutrient density, and shorter, cleaner ingredient lists,” she notes.
Another consideration in this market is the growing interest in precision fermentation of cell-cultured animal proteins. Once the environmental and ethical considerations of meat are removed from the equation—and the price comes down—will these animal-identical (but never living) foods gain broad acceptance?
These are some of the important questions we need to ask in a transitional plant-based products market. As formulators consider new R&D projects for plant-based foods, they need to first understand their target consumer. Authenticity is a hallmark of R&D innovation today, but it holds different meanings for different types of consumers.