These traits give meat brands, retailers and their meat product suppliers a unique opportunity to offer this new Flexitarian consumer innovative new products and SKU offerings that blend meat with plant or vegetable proteins to help grow incremental sales. To cultivate this growing market, meat brands are now marketing these blended products as “Flexitarian-friendly.” The potential for growth of brands positioned as Flexitarian-friendly is strong — 52% of consumers agree that Flexitarian diets are healthy and that number rises to 65% among 25- to 34-year-olds.3
Retailers are already merchandising blended protein products to attract Flexitarians. Since this is a new category, sales data is limited, but the information we have is promising. According to recent IRI data, there has been a 73% increase in the number of branded protein-blend products sold in the last year.4
How fast is the category growing? IRI currently tracks 19 products considered protein blends — eight of those products weren’t even on the market a year ago. Due to the small starting base and the high volume of SKUs introduced, beef blends have seen a 1,416% dollar sales growth — unit sales have grown even more at 2,318% since last year. This growth has caused a significant price drop from an average of $9.24 to $5.79 per unit (-37%), bringing the price in line with traditional ground beef.4