I just got back from the Netherlands after attending Plant FWD, one of Europe’s most thoughtful conferences examining the future of protein production. I didn’t leave feeling more euphoric or confident, but I left more clear-eyed.

Over the past several months, I worked with Foodvalley, a Dutch nonprofit focused on the future of food, to curate a content track exploring balanced proteins. Balanced proteins are exploding in the Netherlands. Just before the conference, Foodvalley released a report examining the state of the category in Dutch retailers. They found that 115 products currently combine animal ingredients with some percentage of plant-based ingredients.

The prevalence of this approach and the enthusiasm I saw in our sessions reflected something I increasingly believe: Europe may be one of the best places in the world to help balanced proteins take off.

But while I was impressed and inspired by the innovation and intention seen in Europe, I was also reminded of the challenges ahead, what American insights bring to the table, and what cross-Atlantic collaboration could mean for the category.

Europe’s Advantage: Permission to Experiment

Europe’s biggest advantage right now is that parts of the ecosystem are moving in the same direction.

As if on cue, the Dutch government released updated dietary guidance while the conference was taking place — recommending a 40% reduction in weekly meat consumption and a 50% reduction in cheese. These guidelines modeled eating patterns for nutritional needs, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and risks like PFAS and heavy metals.

Contrast that with the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans and you can see that some European countries are operating from a different set of assumptions about where the food system is headed.

In places like the Netherlands, that direction is implemented by NGOs, retailers and manufacturers. NGOs (e.g., Foodvalley, ProVeg, Madre Brava, WRI and others) actively engage commercial actors, retailers adopt aggressive protein-transition targets, and private labels nimbly go to market. Because of the top-down policy support, companies are more willing to test new formulations that work toward sustainability goals.

This creates permission to experiment leading to many launches and learnings. One of the most refreshing parts of Plant FWD was hearing manufacturers and retailers openly discuss where they had gotten it wrong, followed by a willingness to try again because it ladders up to something important for them.

Consumer Trust Is the Challenge

But friendly corporate policies do not eliminate commercial risk for the category.

Europe is not a monolith. It contains the same tensions found in the United States: food traditionalism, skepticism of new food technologies, and political incentives to turn food into a cultural fight.

Just a month prior to the conference, the European Commission advanced a proposal prohibiting the use of 31 common food names for vegan and plant-based products. Though it’s unclear how or if this ruling will truly impact plant-based and balanced protein products, most I spoke with believe that the communication battle is far from over.

At the center of this debate is consumer trust.

Foodvalley found that of the 115 Dutch balanced protein products, 70% make little or no mention of the ingredient shift on the front of pack.

You can understand why. These products typically had much lower inclusion rates of plant-based ingredients and the added ingredients are genuinely meant to enhance the products. Maintaining familiar packaging lowers friction, increases trial, and moves the category toward sustainability goals.

But there is a tradeoff. Would consumers continue to purchase these products if everything was explained more explicitly? It’s a loaded question that is quite divisive. The question might have been raised out of industry interest, but it taps into something real that shouldn’t be ignored.

Unclear communication opens the door for others to frame the conversation. Helpful additions may be seen as hidden fillers. Once trust slips, it is expensive to earn back.

America Can Share Hard Lessons

The United States has learned this lesson the hard way.

Whether fair or not, attacks on plant-based meats’ health claims damaged confidence in one of the category’s key selling points. Pair that with taste gaps and price premiums, and you can explain much of the category’s recent slowdown.

In today’s U.S. environment, recovery will likely need to be market-driven.

And in a way, that’s its own strength. The American retail channel is ruthless. Shelf space is expensive, competition is intense, and consumers are distracted and often skeptical. If a product is confusing, overpriced, or mediocre, the market usually tells you quickly.

That system has obvious flaws, but it also elevates the strongest approaches. This will help balanced proteins. The products, partnerships, channels strategies, and messaging that earn their place will create a playbook for how to scale globally.

The Standard Needs to Rise

The surefire way to maintain consumer trust is to make these products unassailable.

Michael Fox of Fable Food made this point during his keynote at the conference: products should taste better, cost less, and improve nutrition. If they cannot clear that bar, they probably should not launch yet.

We need to be relentlessly committed to launching products that are genuinely delicious, clearly affordable, authentically communicated, operationally easy, and meaningfully better on nutrition and sustainability. Anything less risks slowing the category by disappointing the very people it needs to win over.

That’s why Caroline Cotto and NECTAR highlight R&D opportunities to improve taste. It’s why The Balanced Protein Consortium releases consumer insights reports. And it’s why this category must coordinate to elevate winning solutions.

[In fact, you can find NECTAR’s latest sensory analysis on balanced dairy here]

What Europe and America Need From Each Other

Europe is better at creating room for experimentation in retail, and the United States can learn from how policy support can help move markets. The United States may be better at exposing what truly deserves to survive, and those harder lessons can strengthen products everywhere.

To mainstream balanced proteins, the category needs both geographies working together. We need Europe’s willingness to coordinate, test, and generate proof points. We also need the United States’ harsh market learnings on product composition, channel fit, pricing, and communication. Put together, those strengths can help create products that consumers actually choose again and again.

That is the test ahead. The future of protein may still be innovative, but it will only scale if it is trustworthy.

If you’re interested in collaborating to mainstream balanced proteins, you can learn more about the Balanced Protein Consortium, follow updates on LinkedIn, or reach out directly at Tim@balancedprotein.org

I am optimistic about climate change.

There are solutions available here and now. So why aren’t they being implemented as fast as they need to be? The simple answer is: we need funding.

This funding can come from mainstream financial institutions because investment in climate solutions can be profitable.

How much money do we need to solve the climate crisis?

As a PhD Economist with over 25 years of research experience and the Faculty Director at UCSC Institute for Social Transformation, this is an area I spend a lot of time thinking about.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that climate finance for mitigation and adaptation must increase by 3–6 times current levels by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5–2 °C — a figure that external analyses of IPCC-consistent pathways put at roughly 6 trillion USD per year, or about $750 per person globally. This may seem manageable in the abstract until you consider that roughly half the world’s population lives on less than $7 USD per day, or roughly $2,500 USD per year.

The responsibility for financing climate mitigation and adaptation should fall on those whose emissions created the climate crisis, and whose wealth reflects it. The wealth that developed countries enjoy is built on a century and a half of producing GHG emissions without having to account for their impact on the planet or pay for the damages they cause and will continue causing for centuries to come. That accumulated wealth is now the most viable source of capital for financing the transition.

The question is, how do we unlock it?

How do we get the $6 trillion we need?

The wealth of individuals and corporations in rich countries is generally deposited with financial institutions that go on to invest or “manage” it. Globally, this wealth, or assets under management (AUM), is expected to reach $200 trillion USD by 2030. If just 3% of global assets under management were invested in climate solutions every year, this would be the $6 trillion USD we need to avoid the worst climate-related damages.

The question then becomes about incentives. What would help global money managers direct their investments to climate solutions?

Source: Infographic describes the structure of blended finance created by the author with the help of the Claude (Anthropic) AI engine.

First, we need to quantify the financial benefits of climate solutions (like the Social Cost of Carbon, but in a way that’s asset- or location-specific) and figure out which economic agents get to enjoy these benefits. This means carefully measuring the impacts of each climate solution on all potential stakeholders, including nature, individuals, corporations, and governments.

Project Drawdown has taken an important step in this direction. My recent work on the private benefits of nature-based solutions, including the research paper “Financial Value of Nature: Coastal Housing Markets, Mangroves, and Climate Resilience,” is an example of how one may go about it.

Second, we need to create financial instruments that provide incentive-compatible ways for financial institutions to participate. These will most likely include contributions from governments and NGOs to make investments less risky and more attractive. These instruments are called structured or blended finance. They are the best bang-for-the-buck for nonprofit and government investment because it allows these limited funds to leverage private assets.

This is a relatively new area of finance, and many like-minded finance faculty are starting to introduce this material in their curricula. In fact, there is a faculty consortium on Impact & Sustainable Finance that encompasses many finance faculty across the world.

Third, we need governments’ assistance in creating additional incentives for investments in climate mitigation and adaptation. Some encouraging examples already exist. For instance, the UK government’s Contract for Difference (CfD) program is essentially a blended-finance program where the UK government guarantees a minimum price for electricity generated by low-emission producers. This guarantee de-risks investment in offshore wind installation. Another example is the Norwegian government’s company Enova, which provides grants to jump-start investment in emerging decarbonization technologies and in bridging the gap between research, pilot stages, and commercial deployment.

Aligned incentives to drive financial investment

Over time, markets will more fully account for impacts on people, animals, and the planet. But we don’t have to wait for that future to act. There are many opportunities today where financial returns align with positive outcomes for society and the environment.

Our task is to identify and scale projects or innovations that address climate challenges and create economic value. If we do this well, we’ll harness the full force of global markets to accelerate climate progress.

There is no shortage of capital. The opportunity now is alignment.

Concrete insights for practical progress

If you’re interested in how these ideas translate into real-world action, my TEDx Santa Cruz talk, “Funding Climate Solutions,” offers a concise overview of the mechanisms and opportunities to put this approach into practice.

If there was ever a night that made the “protein transition” feel less like a policy idea and more like a lived reality, it was this year’s TASTY Awards in San Francisco.

In a beautiful historic bank-turned-event-space, surrounded by barista milks in espresso drinks, alt yogurts dressed up like fine dining, and plant-based ice cream scooped by Salt & Straw co-founder Tyler Malek, we gathered founders, R&D leads, investors, journalists, and advocates around a deceptively simple question: Can dairy-free really compete on taste?

Our new Taste of the Industry 2026 report offers the clearest answer we’ve seen to date​—and it’s more nuanced, and more actionable, than a simple yes or no.

Taste parity is no longer just hypothetical; its achievable

For years, the narrative around alternative proteins has been aspirational: “One day these products will taste as good as the animal-based versions.” This year’s data suggests that in some parts of the dairy aisle, that day has quietly arrived.

In blind tests with 2,183 omnivores—people who regularly consume animal-based dairy—NECTAR, the sensory research program at FSI, evaluated 98 dairy-free products across 10 categories against their conventional animal benchmarks. Each product was tested by at least 100 consumers in realistic “recipe builds”: creamers in coffee, cream cheese on bagels, shredded cheese on pizza, and so on.

The headline: 27 dairy-free products—nearly a quarter of all products tested—were rated the same or better than their dairy counterparts in overall liking by at least 50% of participants, earning those products a coveted TASTY Award.

In fact, one product, Califia Farms Barista Oat Blend, attained taste parity¹ with Horizon Whole Milk and three other products came very close to achieving this recognition.2

This is not a niche vegan success story; it’s a mainstream sensory story. And it has implications for how we think about science, markets, and social change.

Where dairy-free is already “good enough” for most consumers

One of the clearest signals from this year’s data is that the coffee occasion has become the beachhead for dairy-free success.

Barista milks, creamers, and milks are the strongest-performing categories relative to their dairy benchmarks. Dairy-free leader products in barista milk and creamer were within 0.1 pts of their dairy benchmarks on overall liking (on a 7-point scale). This sensory performance doesn’t just signal early-adopter resonance. It’s evidence that these products are becoming credible defaults.

This progress didn’t happen by accident. The dairy-free industry invested in the science: foaming behavior, stability in hot beverages, flavor performance against coffee’s bitterness and acidity. And that formulation work shows up in the data—and on café menus around the world.

Where we’re still falling short, and why it matters

The picture looks very different in other parts of the dairy case.

Ice cream, cream cheese, and especially mozzarella consistently underperformed their dairy benchmarks in both overall liking and purchase intent. In cheese, the gaps are stark: overall liking for the average dairy-free mozzarella lagged behind its dairy benchmark by 2.1 pts, the largest gap of any category in the study. Purchase intent for dairy-free mozzarella was roughly a third of its dairy counterpart.

When we analyze the sensory data, a familiar set of issues appears: lack of stretch, poor melt, stickiness, gumminess. In other words, the exact textural qualities that make cheese feel indulgent, nostalgic, and “real” are the ones current plant-based formulations struggle to reproduce.

From a market perspective, this isn’t just a technical curiosity; it’s a growth bottleneck. In the report, we saw a clear pattern emerge: categories with higher sensory scores tend to have substantially higher market share. Milk, the best-tasting category in our study, has 15 times the market share of dairy-free cheese, which lags in sensory performance.

If you’re an R&D team or a funder thinking about where to invest the next dollar of innovation, closing the sensory gap in cheese is high-ROI climate work.

Every percentage point of taste improvement can translate into real-world shifts in purchasing behavior in categories with large climate and animal-welfare footprints.

Health, emotion, and the psychology of dairy

Taste is the primary purchase driver, but it doesn’t act alone.

Two pieces of data from this year’s Taste of the Industry report point to underutilized levers:

• Health as a demand amplifier: Nearly half of consumers in our study “strongly agree” that health factors into their purchase decisions. These consumers are significantly more likely to purchase dairy-free products than the general population. That doesn’t mean “health halos” can compensate for poor taste, but it does mean that when taste is competitive, health framing can meaningfully accelerate adoption.
  

• Emotions as a hidden driver: When participants described how dairy makes them feel, they used words like “joy,” “comfort,” “satiation,” “indulgence,” and those emotions correlated with a measurable bump in purchase intent. This suggests that dairy’s advantage isn’t just sensory; it’s emotional.

For brands, the implication is that chasing “parity” on taste alone is necessary but not sufficient.

The next generation of dairy-free products will need to be designed for emotional parity: replicating the rituals, comfort, and indulgence that people associate with dairy, as well as the health attributes they seek, not just its macronutrient profile.

Science as infrastructure for markets and policy

Stepping back, this report is one tile in a larger mosaic. Across NECTAR’s portfolio of work, we’ve now amassed more than 30,000 consumer sensory evaluations on alternative proteins. That scale matters.

• For scientists and technical teams, our data help pinpoint which attributes are driving consumer liking, and in which applications, so developers know where to double down R&D efforts.

• For CPGs, foodservice operators, and retailers, it offers a map of where consumer expectations are already being met and where “good enough” is still out of reach.

• For policymakers and funders, it provides an evidence base for which interventions (from grants to procurement to standards) are most likely to unlock real behavior change and measurable impact.

The stakes are real. Dairy is a major contributor to agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, with some products like cheese carrying particularly high carbon footprints. If we want to move that curve in a meaningful way, we can’t rely on consumer values alone. It requires products that win on taste. Products people choose because they love them, no compromises necessary.

Where we go from here

The TASTY Awards exist to celebrate sustainable protein brands that are already delivering on that promise—those whose products, in blind tests, meet or exceed the taste of their animal counterparts for at least half of consumers. But the awards are also a mirror for the industry.

For leaders across food, climate, and finance, the questions now are less “Is this possible?” and more:

• Where is the sensory bar already high enough to support mainstream shifts, and how do we accelerate adoption there?

• Where are the biggest taste and texture gaps, and what will it take, technically and financially, to close them?

• How do we design not just for taste parity, but for emotional and cultural resonance, so that dairy-free products become default choices in households, cafés, and institutions?

My hope is that this year’s Taste of the Industry report becomes a shared reference point, a piece of common infrastructure our ecosystem can use to coordinate action across science, markets, and society.

Because if there’s one thing this year’s data makes clear, it’s this: the path to a more sustainable food system runs straight through taste. Our job now is to follow the data and build the products, policies, and partnerships that make that path the one consumers naturally choose.

If you’re interested in helping accelerate the protein transition with taste, I invite you to learn more about NECTAR’s research, follow updates on LinkedIn, or reach out directly at Caroline.Cotto@nectar.org!

For the last several years, I’ve attended Expo West in Anaheim where I’ve seen food innovations like protein-packed pasta, re-imagined packaging, and beverages with every functionality under the sun. Last week, I found myself standing beside a “Balanced Protein Consortium” booth with crockpots full of meatballs from The Better Meat Co. and a flattop grill preparing sliders from Joyn Foods.

But I wasn’t in California at all. I was nearly 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. at the Annual Meat Conference.

If Expo West showcases retail experiments, the Annual Meat Conference is where the industry behind the grocery store’s cornerstone department takes stock of itself. Hosted by the Food Industry Association and The Meat Institute, the conference brings together the buyers, processors, suppliers, and analysts who shape what actually shows up in the meat department of American grocery stores.

And this year, a new idea was clearly entering the conversation.

Over the course of the show, balanced proteins—meat products that swap at least 30% of animal-based ingredients with ingredients made from plants, mycelium, or other alternatives—kept appearing across the conference. They showed up in expert Q&As, product demonstrations, and even in the industry’s flagship Power of Meat presentation.

Retailers and processors increasingly see balanced proteins as a practical response to the pressures they’re facing: rising input costs, supply volatility, and consumers who want foods that are both familiar and better for them. Those signals are becoming harder to ignore.

Here are five takeaways from the Annual Meat Conference that explain why:

1. Strong Sales but Gathering Clouds

By conventional metrics, the retail meat department is thriving.

Despite rising costs, meat consumption continues to grow in both unit volume and revenue. Americans are spending nearly $1000 per year on meat, up 7.6% from 2024, and unit sales have increased by nearly 2% year-over-year. For retailers, the meat case remains one of the most important revenue-driving departments in the store.

But beneath those strong numbers is a growing unease about the future.

Beef prices continue to hit record highs, supply volatility is increasing, and consumer expectations around nutrition, cost, and production practices are evolving.

One industry CEO previously warned that retail ground beef could reach $10 per pound this year, and speakers from Nielsen IQ showed us that about 1 in 5 consumers are either looking to stretch their meat-based meals or pulling back on meat purchases.

When a staple product like ground beef starts flirting with double digit pricing, the category has to start asking new questions. By including a diverse set of ingredients that often cost less than conventional beef, balanced proteins are emerging as one possible answer.

2. The Middle of the Meat Case Is Disappearing

Following the theme of price uncertainty, another topic running through the conference was what economists call a K-shaped economy.

On one end of the spectrum, premium meat continues to perform well: specialty cuts, regenerative sourcing, and branded beef lines targeting consumers willing to pay for quality and story.

On the other end, retailers are leaning heavily into value offerings designed to help households stretch their grocery budgets.

What’s disappearing is the middle. Consumers are either trading up or trading down, and the undifferentiated middle tier of the meat case is getting squeezed.

In a polarized meat market, balanced proteins give retailers a way to expand both ends of the spectrum without abandoning the category’s core formats.

They can operate as value products, helping retailers manage costs and offer affordable protein options during periods of commodity volatility. But they can also operate as premium products, pairing meat with high-quality complementary ingredients that enhance flavor and culinary appeal, such as truffle mushrooms and caramelized onions.

3. The Meat Department Is Preparing for a New Buyer

Besides pricing, one of the most consequential shifts discussed throughout the conference was demographic.

For decades, the meat department has largely been built around the preferences of Baby Boomers, who historically drove the largest share of household food spending.

That era is changing. In 2025, Millennials and Gen Z accounted for 67% of all unit growth, and projections show their buying power will exceed boomers in the next year or two. This matters because Millennials and Gen Z bring different expectations to the meat case.

Younger consumers are still eating meat, but their preferences are broader. They are more open to global flavors, more interested in culinary experimentation, and more attentive to nutrition, ingredient transparency, and environmental impact.

Retailers are already beginning to respond. Across the conference floor, you could see experimentation in flavors, formats, and merchandising strategies designed to resonate with younger shoppers.

Balanced proteins fit naturally into that evolution. They preserve the formats people already love while addressing the specific needs of younger consumers.

For retailers trying to modernize the meat department without alienating traditional shoppers, balanced proteins are increasingly appealing.

4. Protein Perceptions Are Shifting

Along with demographics, there is a broader shift in how Americans think about meat.

For years, beef carried the burden of health criticism in the public conversation, but that narrative appears to be shifting. High-protein diets and renewed support for saturated fats have softened some of the critiques that dominated the conversation a decade ago.

A Nielsen IQ poll showed that 60% of Americans state that they are making a conscious effort to consume more protein daily, and The Power of Meat report stated that concerns over the healthiness of eating meat have dropped by 39% since 2020 (down to 19%)

But while the quality of animal protein seems undisputed, production methods may be approaching their own moment of scrutiny.

In qualitative insights shared during the conference, consumers referenced abnormally large chickens as something that makes them uneasy. At the same time, popular movements around cage-free production and regenerative beef and poultry continue to indirectly shine a light on conventional production methods through contrast.

This doesn’t mean demand is about to collapse. But it does suggest that some industrial production methods may be approaching the limits of what consumers find acceptable.

If that’s the case, the next phase of the category may involve higher-welfare and regenerative production systems that come with higher costs.

By incorporating complementary ingredients, balanced proteins help processors stretch more expensive inputs such as regenerative beef while maintaining familiar formats and competitive price points.

5. Nutrient Density Is Becoming the Industry’s North Star

Across presentations and booth conversations, speakers emphasized the nutritional role meat plays in the American diet. Beyond protein, nutrients like iron came up frequently. At the same time, the industry is watching the rise of GLP-1 medications closely.

If a meaningful share of Americans eventually adopt appetite-suppressing drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, total calorie consumption could decline. The possibility of people eating and buying less is causing many in the meat industry to reexamine purchase motivators for their products.

The positioning many in the industry keep returning to is nutrient density. Red meat—with its high protein content, complete amino acid profile, and high levels of zinc and iron—is an attractive food item for consumers looking to maximize their nutritional bang per bite.

Balanced proteins align well with that shift. Because they combine animal ingredients with complementary ones, they can enhance nutritional profiles—adding fiber and micronutrients while preserving the protein density and bioavailability that consumers seek from meat.

The Big Picture: Now Is the Time for Partnership

After a few days spent talking with retailers, processors, and suppliers, I am more convinced than ever that balanced proteins are the future of the meat department.

At our booth, hundreds of retail industry professionals walked up, asked what made the product “balanced,” and tried a meatball or slider. Instead of debating whether this idea belonged in the meat case, retailers would ask about things like production advantages and consumer preferences.

Balanced proteins are designed to navigate the pressures that processors and retailers are already facing, and if this product category continues to grow, it will grow because of the participation and input from retail professionals.

If you’re interested in helping move this work forward, you can learn more about the Balanced Protein Consortium, follow updates on LinkedIn, or reach out directly at Tim@balancedprotein.org

And if you happen to be at next year’s Annual Meat Conference in Grapevine, Texas, come say hello!

Imagine that you’ve signed up to bring a stir-fry to a potluck. You’ve gone to the grocery, with your list in your hand, only to find that every produce aisle of every grocery store has been replaced with a wall of opaque, sealed brown bags.

Every single one is simply labeled “Vegetable.” There are no pictures, no descriptions of the contents, and no indication of whether they are chopped, pre-cooked, or frozen and thawed six times. They are just numbered: Vegetable 1, Vegetable 2, Vegetable 3…

Frustrated though you are, you’ve committed to your dish, so you grab one of each, intending to just figure it out at home. Once there, you shake out the contents into a bowl on your kitchen counter and your face falls. Your shoulders begin to sag. Bag after bag has either been pre-seasoned, pre-chopped, or par-cooked. You give up and decide to just make soup.

Absurd, right? But if you’re a product developer working on meat or dairy alternatives, this is just a Tuesday.

Threading Every Needle

Raw material selection is one of the hardest things to get right when creating any food, especially plant-based meat, dairy, or egg alternatives. All new products start with the same basic question: What ingredients can manage taste, texture, nutrition, color, quality, reliable supply, sustainability, and cost?

An ingredient must satisfy many constraints simultaneously. It has to do more than thread a needle, it has to thread a line of needles at once. Selecting the appropriate ingredients is a task of managing tradeoffs, and if it isn’t done right, the end product will never succeed.

Ingredient suppliers don’t typically produce finished goods. Creating ingredients and creating finished consumer products require different expertise and rarely happen at the same company. That leaves product developers choosing off-the-shelf ingredients while they mutter to themselves, “you get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

They do their homework by reading deeply, talking to a wide range of ingredient sellers, scrutinizing certificates of analysis, and whispering to friends at other companies. But eventually, they must simply request samples, cross their fingers, and start the costly process of trial and error.

The Hidden Tax on Innovation

Here is the part that should worry anyone who wants a more sustainable food system: successful companies devote substantial time and capital working to understand their raw materials and how they will perform in finished products. You might expect that. But the tragic part is that the unsuccessful companies, the ones with brilliant ideas but limited runways, are forced to do the exact same repetitive, foundational work.

This redundancy acts as a hidden tax on innovation, consuming months of R&D cycles and significant capital before a product ever reaches market. If a company is lucky enough to hire a veteran from a major food tech giant, they may bring some “tribal knowledge” into the test kitchen. But even then, those experts are often bound by NDAs, unable to share insights that, in a more mature industry, would function as common standards.. Raw material selection is a shared problem. It is an expensive, time-consuming, industry-wide bottleneck.

So, the question we asked was simple: Where is the shared resource? Why is every startup reinventing the wheel (or the protein isolate) in total isolation?

Enter the Sustainable Protein Action Lab

The Action Lab is an initiative by Food System Innovations designed to solve this problem (and others). Beginning with proteins, the Action Lab is creating a shared resource that will shrink the distance between the starting and finish lines for plant-based products.

We will be putting proteins through their paces, first by extracting them from the most common plant-based protein sources, and then testing their functionality - solubility, gelation, emulsification, water-binding, thermal stability, and more. We evaluate proteins across scales, from molecular behavior to performance in product prototypes. We connect the dots between the protein type, the extraction method used, the basic science of how it behaves, and, perhaps most importantly, how it actually performs in a product prototype.

Ending the ‘Mystery Bag’ Era

We are building a tool that provides an objective, transparent review of ingredient quality. We want to answer the “Why” for the industry:

• Which proteins deliver meat-like texture without major allergens like soy?

• Which isolate creates a stable emulsion without additional additives?

• Is this the right ingredient, but simply processed the wrong way?

By gathering a suite of high-end analytical tools under one roof, we are generating a foundational dataset that does three things:

1. Accelerates learning cycles beyond traditional academic timelines

2. Reduces duplicated experimentation across companies

3. Improves product quality, predictability, and cost efficiency

Our aim is to reduce the industry’s reliance on guesswork. If successful, the ‘mystery bag’ era of food tech will be over. Think of it as navigation infrastructure for ingredient choice. We’re building a Google Maps for product developers. It’s the shared intelligence the industry has been missing to transform a fragmented landscape into a streamlined path to market. When developers spend less time deciphering raw materials, they can spend more time creating foods people actually want to eat.

Advancing sustainable proteins requires a shared effort. If you’d like to visit the lab in Berkeley or explore ways to collaborate, we’d welcome the conversation: info@sustainableprotein.org.

We’re entering a pivotal window for the future of food. The science is advancing, policy momentum is building, and market signals are aligning. But the capital to accelerate a sustainable protein transition isn’t flowing at the scale this moment demands. Let’s dive into why it should, and how we can get there together.

Framing the Steaks

Food systems account for around one-third of the climate crisis, and meat and dairy production account for roughly half the problem, driven by overproduction and overconsumption in select middle- and high-income countries. Development experts warn that global meat and dairy consumption is projected to keep rising, fueled by population growth, rising incomes in emerging economies, and declining prices for commodity animal products.

Source: Our World in Data (2019). “Meat and Dairy Production.”

While methods of meat and dairy production vary across countries, climates, and cultures, large-scale industrial systems stand out as key drivers of global greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have shown the five largest meat and dairy corporations emit more greenhouse gases annually than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP.

The top 5 meat and dairy companies combined emit more greenhouse gases than ExxonMobil, Shell or BP

Sources: GRAIN and IATP (2018). “Livestock products - corporate emissions B.”

But climate is only part of the story. Industrial animal agriculture is pushing the Amazon toward ecological tipping points, driving biodiversity loss at an unprecedented scale, and consuming roughly 30% of the world’s freshwater in what UN experts call an era of “water bankruptcy.” It’s also a major contributor to chronic disease, the leading source of zoonotic disease risk, and the primary driver of animal suffering worldwide.

The trajectory is clear: business as usual will push our planet beyond critical boundaries. Shifting toward sustainable protein sources — particularly in high-consumption regions like the United States — isn’t optional. It’s necessary. And urgent.

The good news? The solutions already exist.

The opportunity is real.

Whole plant-based foods like beans, lentils, nuts, seeds have always been excellent sources of protein, and chefs around the world are reimagining how to make them center-of-plate staples that are as delicious as they are nutritious. At the same time, healthy sustainable protein innovations — plant-based, fermented, cultivated, and blended options — are entering a new phase of development. Sensory and functional profiles have improved dramatically, and cost curves are bending in the right direction. New business models are emerging, including B2B ingredients and Balanced Protein products that meet consumers where they are rather than asking them to make dramatic shifts overnight.

Against this backdrop, regional and national governments are beginning to integrate food systems transformation into sustainability efforts, and climate negotiators, public health experts, and biodiversity advocates are increasingly recognizing protein diversification as a core strategy. Private investors are seeing market opportunities, and civil society is building capacity.

The conditions for transformation are coming into focus. What’s missing is capital to support the protein transition at the speed and with the direction this moment demands.

Food systems need capital. And that capital needs a compass.

During the last decade, sustainable protein innovations have attracted roughly $20 billion. This pales in comparison to the $200–$400 billion in annual subsidies supporting commodity meat and dairy and the hundreds of billions in private capital invested in industrial animal agriculture each year. The gap is staggering. But closing it will require more than money.

Capital needs a compass. Public and private investment needs to be informed by the agricultural experts and producers improving the sustainability and resiliency of production systems, the food scientists developing new healthy and sustainable ingredients, the chefs reimagining what’s possible on the plate, the nutrition experts reframing healthy eating, the policymakers creating enabling conditions, and the entrepreneurs pressure-testing what works in markets.

The good news is that this work is beginning to happen. Countries in the EU have launched national action plans for plant-based foods, backed by significant public investment and spanning everything from farmer support and chef training to R&D and export strategy. Cities and states in the US are implementing procurement policies that enhance sustainability and health outcomes. The World Bank has ranked a shift toward sustainable proteins as the second most promising intervention for agricultural emissions mitigation, while governments from India to the UK to the state of Illinois are making major investments in sustainable protein R&D.

The policy, science, and market momentum are building. What’s needed now is capital that’s informed by that momentum and deployed with precision.

Take a seat at the table.

Maybe you’re a funder exploring where sustainable protein investments can have the most impact, or an investor integrating food system transformation into your climate portfolio. Maybe you’re a researcher with insights about emerging markets, consumer behavior, or technological breakthroughs. Maybe you’re a chef, entrepreneur, or advocate with on-the-ground intelligence about what’s working and what’s not. Or maybe you have connections to leaders who could move the needle — executives, policymakers, academics — and you’re wondering how to elevate these conversations.

If you’re interested in helping shape a sustainable future of food, we want to learn from you.

FSI is a philanthropic impact platform working to improve food systems through science, markets, and society. We work with philanthropic funders and investors, equipping them with research, market intelligence, and strategic connections to deploy capital where it can drive meaningful change.

We know that diverse perspectives make our work stronger and impact more durable. This is why we’re always learning. We’re constantly testing our assumptions, deepening our understanding of the complexities of food systems transformation, and seeking out collaborators who are also grappling with the challenges and opportunities involved in guiding public and private investment toward a sustainable future of food.

We invite you to follow our work, challenge our thinking, and share what you’re seeing in your corner of the food and climate world. Bring us your questions, your insights, your networks. Connect us with people doing interesting things. Help us find the conversations we should be part of — and the ones we’re missing.

The window for reshaping our food system is open. But time is short. Let’s seize this moment now. Let’s figure this out together.

Ready to connect? Reach out to Kelly McNamara, Director of Climate & Nature at FSI. We’re eager to explore how we can collaborate, support your work, and advance global food systems transformation together.

The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans declared meat and dairy as cornerstones of the American diet, and by doing so, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. announced that he was “ending the war on protein.”

But while the ideological “war on protein” may be over in Washington, the actual business pressures threatening the food we love are only intensifying.

The real war on protein is market-driven

By 2050, the global population will exceed 9 billion people. Over the next few decades, we’ll need to produce more food than humanity has produced in the last 8,000 years. At the same time, global demand for animal protein is growing just as land, water, biodiversity, and climate stability become increasingly constrained.

For the meat, dairy, egg, and seafood industries, that collision manifests as higher input costs, greater supply-chain volatility, and mounting pressure on procurement and margin management. There is no scenario where businesses that rely on animal protein successfully maintain the status quo amidst this changing market.

Of the available paths forward, protein diversification stands out as a fast, inexpensive, and minimally-disruptive tool.

So, is there still a business case for protein innovation in this market? Unequivocally, yes.

But if meat remains a $1.5 trillion global industry—governed by manufacturers, retailers, and foodservice operators who ultimately decide what shows up on menus and shelves—the question becomes: how can protein diversification happen meaningfully and quickly within the system as it exists today?

Introducing Balanced Proteins: a pragmatic approach to innovation

Sometimes an old idea can be repurposed to solve modern challenges. For centuries, we combined plant-based ingredients into our food to improve taste, nutrition, and affordability. In other economically tight times, our own federal government approved adding up to 30% of plant-based ingredients into students’ ground beef, poultry, and fish to reduce the cost of feeding our children nutritious meals.

With emerging ingredient technology and maturing plant-based supply chains, this same concept can be applied today with much better outcomes: better products and greater impact.

Food System Innovations defines Balanced Proteins (BPs) as meat, poultry, dairy, egg, or seafood products that substitute at least 30% of the animal-based ingredients for ingredients made from plants, cultivated animal cells, and/or microbial fermentation.

A useful analogy is the hybrid car (with one important caveat: please don’t call food products “hybrid”).

Hybrid cars are driving the electrification of vehicles, especially in non-luxury categories, by solving practical problems for consumers: fuel cost, range anxiety, and sticker price. They also allow legacy manufacturers to participate more successfully in electrification while preserving existing manufacturing assets and consumer trust.

Balanced Proteins do something similar.

For any food innovation to scale, it must demonstrate both consumer acceptance and an operational advantage. Food purchase decisions mainly come down to three things: taste, price, and perceptions. Balanced Proteins excel across all three:

• Taste: Blind sensory panels from NECTAR show several Balanced Protein products achieving taste parity—or even superiority—compared to conventional meat.

• Price: As beef, eggs, and seafood get more expensive, Balanced Proteins offer margin protection and procurement flexibility. Some products are already hitting price parity in real-world settings.

• Perceptions: Consumers eat what they trust. While most people know exactly what to expect from a burger, far fewer feel the same about fully plant-based alternatives. Balanced Proteins sidestep this trust gap by showing up as familiar foods with added benefits.

For consumers, Balanced Proteins are delicious, they’re affordable, and they keep meat and dairy products recognizable. For protein manufacturers and foodservice operators, Balanced Proteins offer a hedge against supply chain volatility without abandoning the core business.

The model is already working

In 2025, Balanced Proteins built measurable momentum based on these product characteristics. Food System Innovations’ 2025 State of the Category report documents accelerating adoption across foodservice, European retail, and manufacturing. The report features real-world proof points on taste performance, pricing, and operational fit such as:

• Compass Group Australia planning to swap 30% of its minced beef for a balanced version

• Lidl Netherlands pricing balanced beef 33% lower than conventional options

• Disneyland expanding 50/50 burgers beyond its main menu to all kids’ sliders (showcasing its ‘stealth health’ applications for parents tired of the fight over veggies)

  

Read the full report

So What’s Next for Balanced Proteins?

The real war on protein is the inevitable market dynamics adding pricing and supply chain pressures to the food system, and Balanced Proteins are a pragmatic response. By aligning consumer behavior, business incentives, and system resilience, Balanced Proteins offer one of the clearest near-term paths to protecting the food we know and love.

If you’re interested in pressure-testing this approach, learning more about how to do it successfully, or introducing these products to your organization; join me and fellow category stakeholder in the Balanced Protein Consortium, follow updates on LinkedIn, or reach out directly at Tim@balancedprotein.org.

I’ll continue sharing what’s working, where friction remains, and how this category can scale responsibly with industry, not against it.

Let’s build what works.

If you work on food systems, are curious about the future of food, or simply care about what ends up on your plate, you’re in the right place.

Welcome to Field Notes, a new Substack from Food System Innovations (FSI).

FSI is a philanthropic impact platform investing in a more humane and sustainable future of food. Our work sits at the intersection of science, markets, and society, with a particular focus on accelerating the transition to sustainable proteins.

We are entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists, strategists, and operators who spend our days grappling with how food systems actually work, and how we might make them work better.

This Substack is FSI’s attempt to learn in public: to share ideas in progress, surface real-time insights, interrogate assumptions, and engage more directly with a growing community of people who care deeply about food system transformation.

Our Field Notes will cover the full breadth of FSI’s work: We’ll share insights from building the world’s largest public sensory dataset for sustainable proteins, explore how category innovation like Balanced Proteins (or so-called ‘blended meats’) can scale more humane and sustainable foods in familiar formats, and reflect on what it takes to accelerate science and technology through new models of applied R&D.

We’ll also reflect on our work deploying philanthropic capital across civil society, advancing food on the climate agenda, and leveraging AI and machine learning to accelerate the protein transition.

Food system innovations are critical and urgent

The motivation behind our work is straightforward: food system innovations aren’t optional, they’re urgently needed.

A few hard truths frame the challenge:

• Diet is the leading risk factor for death globally. Roughly one in five deaths worldwide is linked to the food we eat.

• A hunger crisis looms on the horizon. In early 2025, an open letter signed by 133 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates warned that humanity is “not even close” to meeting future food needs, calling for urgent investment in “moonshot” food system innovations to avert a “hunger catastrophe” by midcentury.

• Food systems are central drivers of planetary degradation. Food, agriculture, and related land use are among the largest contributors to freshwater depletion, land-use change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions.

• Food alone threatens climate stability. Food systems account for roughly one-third of global emissions. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped tomorrow, food-related emissions alone could push global warming beyond 2°C.

• The moral cost of our food system is staggering. Humans kill an estimated 210 billion animals for food annually, which is more than the total number of humans who have ever lived. As animal agriculture has industrialized, a vast majority of these animals have lives that are, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The list goes on and on…

These realities frame one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century: reimagining how food is produced, distributed, and consumed so it can nourish a growing global population within planetary boundaries while reducing the extraordinary human and farmed animal suffering embedded in today’s systems.

Food is complex, interdisciplinary, political, and important

My name is Max Elder, and I’m the CEO of FSI. I’ve loved food for my entire life and have been thinking about food systems obsessively for the past decade. I believe food is one of the most powerful levers we have to shape our collective future.

I’ve worked on global food systems from a diversity of angles: publishing academic research, advising companies and foundations, collaborating with policymakers, and starting a venture-backed food company. Across these experiences, a few lessons stand out that shape both FSI’s work and this Substack:

1. Food systems are deeply complex.

Nuance is usually the first casualty when we talk about food. Conversations tend to collapse into blunt, often hollow questions: Is the food system broken? Do consumers have choice? Is a plant-based burger healthy? These aren’t useless questions, but they’re often the wrong ones. Food systems can’t be easily reduced to single narratives, definitive judgements, or silver-bullet solutions.

Plato is attributed to saying “the right question is often more important than the right answer.”

This Substack exists to ask better questions. To sit with complexity rather than flatten it. To explore the tradeoffs, tensions, and uncertainties that actually shape how food systems operate and how they change.

We bring strong opinions that are weakly held. This Substack is a space to test assumptions, refine thinking, and change our minds when the evidence demands it.

2. Food system innovations are inherently interdisciplinary.

Food systems are woven into nearly every dimension of human life: culture, history, health, climate, economics, labor, land, justice, and more.

Because of this, food system innovations inevitably involve tradeoffs. Solving one problem often creates second- and third-order effects elsewhere. Some are beneficial. Others are unintended. Ignoring these downstream impacts may simplify the story, but it rarely produces durable solutions.

Progress requires engaging with diverse perspectives, including those that challenge our own assumptions. It requires holding multiple values at once: health, sustainability, affordability, equity, taste. And it requires being honest about where those values align and where they come into tension. Our task is not to eliminate tradeoffs, but to understand them clearly and manage them thoughtfully. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

3. Food is a cornerstone of our identities and our politics.

As Warren Belasco writes, “Food identifies who we are, where we came from, and what we want to be. [...] We are what we eat, and we also are what we do not eat.”

Like the clothes we wear and the votes we cast, the food we eat signals who we are, where we come from, and what we stand for. As a result, food system innovations are deeply cultural and political. At an even more fundamental level, food sits at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, shaping human motivation in ways that are both deeply personal and universal.

Because food functions as an identity-shaping and identity-protecting behavior, efforts to change food systems can quickly become emotionally charged. Identity-based politics are inherently messy and demand care, humility, and empathy.

This creates a particular challenge for anyone working on food systems. We are not neutral observers; we are all eaters, interpreting these systems through our own identities, values, and cultural norms (myself included). How, then, do we build broad coalitions for change when food is something we engage with multiple times a day, and when those engagements are so deeply shaped by who we are?

We see identity politics as an inherent part of working on food systems, not something to avoid or ignore. This Substack is an opportunity for FSI to lean into these nuances, examining them openly and thoughtfully to help inform our collective work.

4. Food systems matter to everyone.

As Marion Nestle reminds us, “Because everyone eats, everyone has a stake in the food system.” Such universality is a source of strength. It ensures that food system innovations aren’t owned by any one discipline, ideology, or group, but shaped by many. The resulting diversity adds complexity but also ensures progress is durable; diversity is a terrific design principle for resilience.

Join us

We’re designing this Substack as a space for curious eaters who want to better understand how food shapes our plates, our planet, and our future.

If this resonates, please subscribe to Field Notes for future insights from food system innovators; share this Substack with a friend or colleague to grow our community; and expand our thinking by sharing your own insights and ideas in the comments.

Field Notes are strongest when the margins are filled in together.