Mushrooms, jackfruit and peas don’t usually feature on the meat counter, but in June 2019 UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's opened a temporary meat free butcher to celebrate World Meat Free Week. With the demand for plant-based alternatives showing no signs of slowing down, their latest venture hopes to remove the uncertainty that many customers still feel about plant-based proteins. We explore the insights behind Sainsbury’s disruptive plant-based campaign, and why inspiration may be the missing anchor when it comes to augmenting the vegan revolution.
Housed in a traditional butcher in Bethnal Green, the three day pop-up provided customers with the opportunity to browse from over a dozen meat alternatives displayed in the conventional style of a butcher. With the help of an in-store ‘butcher’ trained in plant-based cooking, visitors were able to receive tips and recipe ideas in a bid to both demystify and inspire cooking with the new range of ingredients infiltrating meat-free shopping aisles. The initiative to not only provide alternatives but educate the public on meat free options came after Sainsbury's Future of Food report found that when it comes to vegan products, 56% of 2,000 people polled say they have never tried a meat alternative.
With the likes of big meat industry players including KFC and Greggs introducing new meat-free alternatives, the future of plant-based cuisine looks to be going mainstream. However, despite a growing interest in plant-based living Sainsbury’s research found that surprisingly over half of Britons haven’t tried meat alternatives, with 40% of people worrying they won’t like the taste and 36% not knowing how to cook them. "Whilst we're seeing a huge climb in sales of our plant-based foods, we know from conversations with customers that there is a sense of trepidation about cooking with them,” says Sainsbury's buyer James Hamilton.
However, the nervousness that seems to be embedded in the nation’s culinary ability does not appear to be restricted to vegan cuisine. A survey commissioned by the UK’s leading recipe box delivery service HelloFresh last year discovered that only 4 in 10 Britons know more than 9 recipes, with the average person’s mental cookbook containing fewer than 6 meals. Rather than a lack of interest, fear of getting a recipe wrong and wasting ingredients were cited as two key reasons people choose to stick to what they know.
Bringing time constraints and tight budgets into the mix, the need for the plant based movement to reassure and inspire as well as inform appears to be essential if it is to assimilate into an already culinarily impaired Britain. By opening up the conversation surrounding cooking with unfamiliar ingredients Sainsbury's latest disruptive marketing move might be on the way to bring some much needed confidence and inspiration back into the cooking process for nervous supermarket shoppers.
Matilda Ruck is a Junior Behavioural Analyst at Canvas8. She has a degree in Politics and Philosophy as well as a foundation in psychotherapy. She's passionate about exploring the interplay between creativity, psychology and culture. Outside of work, you can find her writing short stories, tending to her ginger cat Thomas O’Malley or oscillating between yoga and karaoke practice.
