Plant-based meat a non-starter in India, but here's why that could change

“Alternative meats, as fancy as they may sound, are still 10 times more expensive than regular meat,” he adds, “So a large part of how successful they will be depends on their price points; it’s as simple as that.”

Sushil makes a fair point. Two burger patties totalling to 226 grams from perhaps the most popular plant-based meat brand, Beyond Meat, are priced at Rs 999. On that count, ITC may have already won the pricing game. A package of its ‘Incredible’ plant-based burger patties (330 grams) comes at Rs 630 only.

The fact, however, remains that an increasing number of Indian consumers have begun consuming plant-based meat. “If this number wasn’t going up, you wouldn’t have so many packaged food majors foraying into the segment and selling plant-based meat,” says Naveen Chandramohan, founder at ITUS Capital, “As niche as this market segment is, an increasing number of consumers have begun caring more about what they’re putting in their mouths.”

While ITC itself may be the first “major” Indian conglomerate to foray into selling plant-based meat, a few others have already waded these waters--startups like Vegolution, GoodDot and Imagine Meats, to name a few.

In October, Vegolution founder Siddharth Ramasubramanian told CNBC-TV18 he was hoping to bring fermented soybean super-food Tempeh into the mainstream Indian market through Vegolution’s ‘Hello Tempayy’ brand. “I can use it (Tempeh) as Bolognese on my pasta or as a Chettinad gravy with some parota, or even mash it up and shallow fry it to make galouti kebabs,” he said.

The market for Tempeh (which admittedly has a flavour profile that matches meat) was good enough to have Vegolution double their capacity from 75 to 150 tonnes per annum, and add three more variants of the product to its portfolio.

However, the fact still remains that alternative meat occupies a microscopic market share when compared to the market for meat in general. Sample this: Fipola, which is set to become India’s largest meat retail marketplace by the end of FY22 with 101 stores and annual revenues of Rs 240 crore, sees plant-based meat account for merely 0.2 percent of its overall sales.

“We launched plant-based meat products at Fipola over five months ago, but there is still absolutely no pick-up,” says Suhil, “You have consumers buying it once, but it’s quite evident that there is no repeat buying. It wouldn’t be off the market to say that plant-based meat could take more than ten years from now to grow in India.”

Given that nearly 92 percent of Indian meat retail is unorganized, the good news for plant-based meat brands is that as organised retail expands, there is every indication that newer consumers across different cities could well add to their top-line.