The world’s biggest purchaser of beef is watching the plant-based meat market. “Plant-based protein is something we’re keeping an eye on as we start to think about the opportunities there and growth in that space,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s senior vice-president of corporate strategy, told a women’s conference in California hosted by Fortune magazine in December. It is hardly a surprise that the popularity of meat alternatives has caught the attention of the leading fast food company.
An increasing number of large food and agricultural companies have been investing in alternative protein groups — US meat group Tyson Foods has taken a stake in plant based meat company Beyond Meat, leading agricultural trader Cargill has invested in cellular meat start-up Memphis Meats and Unilever bought a Dutch plant-based food company, Vegetarian Butcher. The consumer trend described by food and marketing executives as a “paradigm shift” seems to be driven largely by concerns about health and weight loss, but it comes as worries increase over greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and food production.
Over the past four to five years, the spotlight on agriculture and food industries’ impact on the environment has intensified amid fears over the prospect of population growth and food demand driving crop and livestock cultivation. “You can see there is a path to greatly reduce emissions in energy and transport and all of a sudden agriculture emissions look big. Off the agricultural total, livestock is the big factor,” said Channing Arndt, director of the environment at the International Food Policy Research Institute, a developmental think-tank.
Food and agricultural production accounts for about a quarter of all global emissions, with two-thirds of that coming from the livestock sector, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Amid that backdrop, leading institutional investors are raising their concerns about the risks of investing in the food and agricultural sectors.