Marketing and promoting plant-based proteins

Most U.S. consumers are open to plant-based meat and dairy, but capturing them requires strategic marketing

In GFI’s consumer segmentation research, we found that almost three in four of U.S. adults from Gen Z to Gen X are open or are already eating plant-based alternatives, representing roughly $60–70 billion of U.S. retail spend on conventional meat. These are not all vegetarians, or even flexitarians, but consumers with diverse attitudes and needs that are coming to plant-based eating in different ways and for different reasons. 

Still, plant-based meat isn’t top of mind for most consumers. After taste/texture and cost, lapsed consumers are mostly likely to say they stopped eating plant-based meat because they “never think about it.” Over half of plant-based meat holdouts say they’ve never tried it simply because they don’t see a reason to. In 2025, only about one in ten consumers claimed to have seen, read, or heard “a lot” about plant-based meat in the past year.

It’s clear that plant-based proteins have a foothold in the market and most consumers are open—but ultimately, they need to see and hear about these products and understand their value proposition much more than they do today to drive adoption and increased use. 

In 2019, GFI developed this guide to marketing plant-based proteins in U.S. retail. While the plant-based category has evolved significantly since that time, the main findings of this study continue to reflect our understanding of how consumers engage with the category in retail. Download our marketing guide for insights including: 

• Emphasizing taste and other important plant-based food attributes
• The benefits of plant-forward category language
• Best practices in shopper marketing