“We Matched the Meat. So Why Didn’t They Come?” Andre Menezes Calls Time on Plant-Based Fairytales

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Once upon a time, the plant-based sector believed in a neat formula: match meat on price, taste, and convenience and the masses would follow. They didn’t.

Speaking at Bridge2Food Europe in The Hague, TiNDLE Foods co-founder and former CEO, Andre Menezes didn’t just suggest a rethink. He 'key-noted' the event by detonating a few myths that have quietly haunted the plant-based alt-protein industry since its 2019 peak.

“In 2019, it felt inevitable. If we could match meat on taste, sustainability, and price, how could we not grow from 1.5% to 10% market share in a few years?”, says Andre Menezes.

Source: Andre Menezes speaking at Bridge2Food Europe in The Hague,

We had money. We had listings. We had trials. What we didn’t have? Repeat customers.

The inconvenient truth, says Andre Menezes, is the problems we’ve been trying to solve -climate, emissions, intensive farming are real, but they’re not consumer pain points. “They are societal problems, but certainly not problems that consumers care about when they are buying.”

It’s a critical distinction. The sector built products around what mattered to investors, policymakers, and activists, but forgot to ask what shoppers actually want at 5:45pm in the supermarket.

Plant-based milk had its “oat moment” with a perfect storm of intolerance, frothability, and hipster café culture. But meat analogues aren’t milk. They’re not replacing an allergen or a bad habit. They’re trying to replace the heart of dinner. And that, as Menezes bluntly puts it, is not what most people are looking to replace.

“No real pain point, no real urgency. We’ve built the alternative without being clear on what the original was solving for.”

Even where price and taste now stack up, especially in markets like Germany, the growth has been wildly uneven. Burger King Germany embraced the plant-based Whopper. Burger King US? Still lagging.

So what now? Menezes isn’t pessimistic. He’s realistic. And in that realism, there’s room for serious innovation.

He flagged three key shifts:

• Hybrid and blended products - using plant inputs inside meat to solve functional issues like moisture, cost, and consistency.

• Less evangelism, more utility - solutions that do something better, not just differently.

• New cultural playbooks - getting out of the echo chamber and into arenas that shape taste: music, sport, youth culture.

  
  

Even Impossible Foods' Peter McGuinness is floating the idea of meat products that borrow from the plant playbook to fix real issues — the same way meat processors have quietly done for decades.

And as for cultivated meat? Menezes is sceptical it’ll fare any better. Not because it won’t work, but because it’s still chasing a non-existent pain point.

“What short-term, purchase-driving problem is cultivated meat actually solving? Not one that consumers are expressing.” concludes Andre Menezes.

The message is clear. Don’t just fix the world. Fix dinner.

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