Photo: Governorkeagan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket, has committed to increasing its sales of plant-based meat alternatives by 300% by 2025, becoming the first UK retailer to set a target like it.
The pledge, announced yesterday (Tuesday, September 29), is part of a partnership with WWF that aims to halve the environmental impact of the average UK shopping basket. Tesco will also publish its sales of plant-based proteins as a share of its total protein sales every year, so anyone can check whether it's on track.
The supermarket will stock plant-based alternatives right next to their meat equivalents, and add plant-based options across 20 categories including frozen food, ready meals and party food. CEO Dave Lewis said:
Our transparency on protein sales and our new sales target for meat alternatives gives us the platform to becoming more sustainable and will provide customers with even more choice.
The 300% is measured against a 2018 baseline. WWF chief executive Tanya Steele welcomed the move:
It's great to see this sector-leading step from Tesco. Tackling the environmental impact of what we eat and how we produce it has never been so urgent.
She's not exaggerating. WWF's Living Planet Report 2020, published earlier this month, found that wildlife populations have declined on average by 68% in the last 50 years, and Steele called the food system "the biggest culprit". The University of Oxford's Joseph Poore found that meat and dairy use 83% of the world's farmland but supply just 18% of our calories. Free up that land and nature gets room to come back.
Tesco has form here. In 2018 it brought in chef Derek Sarno to launch Wicked Kitchen, its range of chef-crafted vegan meals, and a year before that a major supermarket rearranged its stores to encourage shoppers to eat more veg. Now the country's biggest grocer is putting a number on it. (We'll be watching that annual report.)
It's another sign of the plant-based revolution Google predicted. This year plant-based meat sales surged 264% in the US, a German sausage maker sold more veggie than sausage for the first time and KFC sold a million vegan burgers in a month. You're voting with your wallet, and the supermarkets are listening.
The future is looking brighter.