Home-grown start-ups join global giants in race to tap China’s plant-based alternative meats market as middle-class appetite for healthier food grows stronger
- The nation’s meat substitutes retail market grew at an average 7.7 per cent to US$10 billion last year from 2015 as Chinese average disposable incomes have climbed
- One newcomer, Singapore-based Green Planet Foods, aims to invest billions of US dollars in the next five years in the nascent sector in China
China’s plant-based meat market is getting more crowded as domestic start-ups join international giants in a race to tap the growing middle class’ appetite for healthier food options.
“China’s rising middle class is getting wealthier and has an immense appetite to try new things … there is a big shift toward [products that offer] health and wellness,” Petersen told the Post. “Our vision is to bring down the prices of plant-based food though innovation, scale and formulations.”
Green Planet’s other co-founders are Hong Kong-based private equity firm China Renaissance Capital Investment, headed by Mark Qiu Zilei, a former chief financial officer of state-backed offshore oil company CNOOC, and Singapore-based Ashok Vasudevan and his wife Meera, an American-Indian couple who built a multinational natural and organic food business.
The Singapore-headquartered company will initially be targeting young families in their 20s and 30s in big cities.
“We will be offering affordable food that can provide wellness instantly,” Vasudevan said. “And we will be going into different segments of the entire supply chain at the same time – from controlled environment agriculture, intermediate products and ready-to-eat products.
“Each project or product will get incubated or accelerated first at our design laboratory in Singapore [and] they can become independent once they are ready to be scaled up in China.”