Plant-based salt reduction, acceptance of new proteins, technical conversion challenges and more

Reduce and Replace’: Plant-based brands can dramatically reduce salt by following beverage industry sugar strategy – academic leader

According to a nutrition expert, plant-based brands must dramatically reduce salt levels by adopting a similar “reduce and replace” strategy used by the sugary-sweetened beverage industry to ensure consumers can reap the health benefits of the trend.

While the plant-based products sector has experienced incredible growth in recent years, significant concerns still remain about the veracity of nutrition and health claims made by industry brands, as well as the potential as-yet-unverifiable risks of long-term consumption.

One of the concerns most commonly raised by nutritionists has been the high sodium content, with most plant-based products on the market today considered highly processed foods which also tend to require salt to mask potential off-flavor notes, particularly when it comes to the vegetable meat sector.

New Protein Production: APAC consumer acceptance increases, but scalability still hinders affordability

New protein production technologies, such as cultured meat and precision fermentation, are seeing increased consumer acceptance in APAC, but are still a long way from achieving price parity for the everyday consumer due challenges with regulations and scale.

Interest in cultured meat and fermentation has been especially evident from an investment perspective: Industry reports have shown that as of 2021, a total of $1.38 billion has already been invested in the produce sector. cultivated, a sector that has not yet been launched any large-scale commercial product; and a total of US$1.69 billion was invested in protein fermentation in 2020-2021 alone.