Last year vegan meat finally arrived at the Swiss. Pascal Bieri, the founder of the Zurich startup Planted, was instrumental in driving this development forward. His company has already raised over 45 million francs from investors.
Planted produces vegetable meat in the factory in Kemptthal. Starting next year, a ton of vegan meat will be produced here every hour.
Pascal Bieri is late. The 36-year-old founder of the start-up Planted Foods still had to bring Christmas cards to the post office for the 150 employees of his company. Since Bieri founded Planted together with three colleagues, he has seldom been able to breathe deeply: “We are so fast that it sometimes seems to me that Planted has been around for ten years.”
Everyone knows the feeling: when things go well, time flies by. Founded in July 2019, Planted was able to land a coup just six months later: Planted Chicken has been on Coop’s shelves since January 2020, and this year the company occupied the first place in the ranking of the 100 best Swiss startups, At the end of January 2022, Planted is expanding its factory in Kemptthal. The production capacity will then be doubled to one tonne of vegetable meat per hour.
Pascal Bieri brought the right product to market at the right time.
Planted has brought the right product onto the market at the right time: this year, animal-free meat eating has prevailed in Switzerland. Planted alone sells its vegetable meat in over 1500 supermarkets and 400 restaurants throughout Switzerland.
The Federal Office for Agriculture has calculated that the Swiss bought 74.5% more vegan and vegetarian meat last year than in the previous year. A third of the buyers of plant-based substitute products at Coop tried them out for the first time in 2020 a study of the retailer revealed.
Change is only possible through taste
Pascal Bieri only eats meat for professional reasons. The last time he ate a pork schnitzel was a few weeks ago to see how it tasted compared to the planted schnitzel.
The products from Planted should be as close as possible to the animal original in terms of taste, texture and protein content. “If we eat vegan, then we want to eat the way we are used to culturally and how it tastes,” says Bieri.
For Christmas, Planted, in cooperation with the German professional chef Sebastian Copien, brought a vegan holiday roast onto the market. The day before Christmas Eve, the roast was only available in Switzerland. In Germany the demand was so high that it was sold out within a very short time.
A different kind of tech startup
Planted invests over a third of its budget in research and development so that the roast, the chicken or the planted kebab looks and tastes like meat.
Bieri came up with the idea for Planted while living in the USA and trying the early version of the burger from the American market leader Beyond Meat. Shortly afterwards he called his cousin Lukas Böni, who was doing his doctorate in food science at the ETH. Bieri asked him if it was possible to make something similar, just without the additives, such as the flavor grillin, which Beyond Meat contains in the United States.
Bieri flew to Switzerland and worked with his cousin and the other co-founders Eric Stirnemann and Christoph Jenny on the production of meat that only consists of yellow pea protein, pea fibers, rapeseed oil and water. To date, Planted has raised over CHF 45 million from investors.
Everything is scientifically checked in the Planted factory in Kemptthal: More than a third of the budget goes into research and development.
Fast growing niche market
Despite the strong growth, conventional meat still accounts for over 95% of the sales volume in the Swiss meat and meat substitute market. Young, better-earning, urban German-speaking Swiss in particular buy meat substitute products. According to the Federal Office for Agriculture, it is mainly older people from western Switzerland who live in the countryside who do not like vegan meat.
Pascal Bieri reports, however, that Planted is getting more and more positive feedback from older customers. Also one representative survey by Coop shows that the group of 50 to 60 year olds only buy insignificantly less meat substitutes than 20 to 30 year olds. In addition, over a third of all respondents said that they would buy more herbal substitutes in the next five years.
Planted’s product range is expanding and is available almost everywhere. In Switzerland alone, Planted sells its vegan meat in over 1500 supermarkets and 400 restaurants.
The reasons for saying goodbye to meat are different. Through consumer surveys, Planted knows relatively exactly why customers buy the plant-based meat. The four main reasons taste, animal welfare, environmental protection and personal health are distributed relatively evenly according to age and origin, says Bieri.
Even if only a minority eat vegan meat so far, the prospects are promising. The management consultancy Kearney predictsthat the global consumption of animal meat will decrease by over a third by 2040, also because of the marketability of Laboratory meat. The latter could be “an exciting ingredient” in the future, says Bieri. For the time being, Planted is sticking to the plant-based meat. The first factory outside Switzerland is scheduled to open in 2023.
By the way, on Christmas Eve Bieri’s classic fondue chinoise was served, for some family members also with meat. Of course, he only gets on Planted himself.