IKEA Plant-Based Meals Climb to 36% as Meatball Share Falls for the First Time

The famous IKEA meatball is finally losing ground to the plant ball. A new case study from Coolfood, the sustainable food program of the World Resources Institute, reports that IKEA recorded the first ever decline in meatball share in its 2025 financial year.

Plant-based main meals are climbing too. In IKEA stores run by Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, 36% of the main meals offered were plant-based in FY24, up from around 30% a year earlier, according to the IKEA Sustainability Report FY24. Emissions from food ingredients fell 6% over the same year.

IKEA sells around 1 billion meatballs a year, so every swap counts. Demand for the plant ball has grown about 1% a year since its 2020 launch, and it is now on the menu in 55 of IKEA's 62 markets. In more than 30 markets the plant-based options cost the same as the meat versions, or less.

The hot dog has gone plant-based as well, launching in 14 European markets in 2023 and reaching the US and Australia in 2024. When IKEA unveiled it, Helene von Reis, Food Manager at IKEA of Sweden, said:

We want to offer more plant-based alternatives with a lower climate impact. Choosing plant-based food often impacts climate footprint less than animal-based options.

Dairy is shifting too. In October 2023 every IKEA store in Japan switched its 50-yen soft serve to a soy milk recipe, at the same price.

There is still a gap to close, as IKEA's goal is for half of the main meals offered in its restaurants to be plant-based by the end of 2025. The direction is right, though. A 2023 Oxford study of 55,504 people in Nature Food found vegans' diets produced about a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions of high meat-eaters' diets.

Back in 2023 IKEA said it would look to remove or replace dairy, and that summer the Oxford study showed a vegan diet cuts climate impact by 75%. Earlier this month Lidl GB smashed its plant-based sales target with a 694% rise, and in Britain plant milk is now in over a third of households.

The plant ball is on a roll.