The brightly coloured graphic painted on the facade of its office in The Calls makes it one of Leeds’ most Instagrammed spots. It has raked in £30m from investors and is currently finalising another fundraising. However, with its quarter pounders, sausages and chicken breasts shaped from pea protein, Meatless Farm thinks the future is bright. Ethan Brown, its chief executive, said he didn’t know if it was “an aberration or a harbinger of things to come”. The share price of alt-meat firm Beyond Meat is also depressed after sales declined in the last three months of 2021. Shares in Swedish alt-milk producer Oatly crashed about 20% one day in November on warnings about production delays and inflation, and have continued their slide since then. But with households budgets now being squeezed by inflation the “big question” says Geijer, is whether they will keep buying more of what are often more expensive products. The demand for alt-meat and dairy products has been fuelled by consumer interest in health, animal welfare and sustainability, which was heightened during the pandemic. After a rapid growth spurt during the pandemic UK retail sales of alt-meat and dairy products are now more than £1bn a year. The prize is a big one for the entrepreneurs who get it right. “In the US there’s the Protein Highway in the Midwest and in the Netherlands there’s Vegan Valley in the eastern part of the country.” Thijs Geijer, an economist at ING Research, says these emerging clusters are a “bit of a trend”. There is another crop coming up behind them, with almost 20 alt-food brands established in Yorkshire in the past year alone, according to Companies House data.
The established meat-free company Quorn is in Yorkshire, along with new plant-based companies like Meatless Farm, Plant and Bean, Over the Spoon and VFC. “We love it here and the people we have access to are incredible.” “We’re a family business and never entertained the notion of being anywhere else,” adds Nick. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Brothers Nick, left, and Tom Watkins, co-founders and joint CEO at Mighty, a manufacturer of sustainable plant based milk, one of a cluster of West Yorkshire companies developing dairy-free food products.
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