The great fake meat meltdown is taking plant-based burgers with it
When Alejandro Cancino founded Fenn Foods, he was entering an industry forecast to be worth $3 billion this decade. Then came the age of eating “real food”.
Plant-based burgers were meant to be the next big thing, but they suffered from the shift away from processed foods. Bethany Rae
For a while, the boom was on. Tonnes of plant-based burger patties, meatballs and mince were being shipped out of Fenn Foods’ Sunshine Coast factory every week. There were plans for plant-based chicken products. The company, run by Argentine Alejandro Cancino, had just launched the world’s first carbon-neutral plant-based meat.
There was a feeling of inevitability that plant-based foods were on the cusp of the mainstream. And for good reason. Impossible Foods, the company behind the Impossible Burger, perhaps the best-known plant-based meat product, was being sold in Burger King stores. Then the burger – soy, potato, wheat and a molecule known as heme that approximated blood – was in Grill’d, and at cult Australian chicken shop Butter.
