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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Hormel

Applegate to Launch New Blended Meat and Vegetable Burgers in Retail This Month

Hormel-owned Applegate will begin selling Well Carved, its frozen line of blended meat and vegetable products, in grocery stores this month, according to IngredientsNetwork. Well Carved includes hybrid beef and turkey burgers mixed with beans and vegetables, as well as blended meatballs. The new offerings feature a garden-full of plants lentils, cauliflower, spinach, parsley, and kale.

The Well Carved line was meant to debut at the Natural Products Expo West in March, but like every other event, it was postponed in response to COVID-19. Applegate decided to push the launch back to April and do it with retailers — though it hasn’t yet specified which ones, how many, or in which areas.

Applegate was actually the first Big Meat brand to venture into blended products. It launched The Great Organic Blend Burger, made from a mixture of beef and mushrooms, a year ago. That puts it well ahead of Tyson, which debuted its Raised & Rooted line of blended beef burgers and plant-based chicken nuggets in June. Soon after, chicken giant Perdue also released a line of hybrid chicken nuggets, made with plant-based protein from Better Meat Co.

Pricing may be a hurdle for Applegate. A four-pack of Well Carved burgers goes for $9.99, which is almost twice the price of a four-pack of organic beef burgers at some supermarkets. In fact, it’s almost on par with the price of Beyond Beef burgers. I’m wondering if people looking to cut their meat consumption will actually purchase a blended burger when, for roughly the same cost, they can just buy a delicious plant-based substitute?

Two things could work in Hormel’s favor, though. One, the Well Carved burgers are frozen. And in a time when people are stocking up on frozen food like nobody’s business to avoid grocery runs, that’s a good thing. Well Carved burgers also position themselves as clean label and wholesome — that is, they contain only vegetables and meat. Some critics don’t like that plant-based meat like Beyond and Impossible contains a litany of ingredients and is processed. That could spur flexitarian consumers looking to cut their meat consumption to give Well Carved a try.

It’s a prime time to drop a new alt-meat product in retail. With COVID-19 spurring sharp increases in grocery sales for both meat and plant-based meat, this is a prime time to experiment and see if blended burgers can actually make it in the market.

Hormel Joins the Meatless Meat Movement With New Portfolio of Plant-based Products

Add one more to the list of major CPGs looking to capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for plant-based meat. This week, Hormel Foods, who owns brands like Skippy and Applegate, announced the launch of its Happy Little Plants product line. This is Hormel’s first project under what the company’s new plant-based foods division called Cultivated Foods.

The new portfolio’s flagship product is a ground protein offering the Happy Little Plants’ website says you can cook “just like you would with ground beef or ground turkey.” The product contains 20 grams of non-GMO soy protein and is gluten-free.

Right now, Happy Little Plants products are available at select Hy-Vee stores in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconson. Further expansion is in the works, though Hormel didn’t name specific cities or timeframes.

Like most big CPGs bringing plant-based meat alternatives to market right now, Hormel is emphasizing the meat-like qualities of its meatless product. In a bid to appeal to more flexitarians — those wanting to curb meat consumption without going full vegan or vegetarian — food companies are currently creating alternatives to meat that cook, look, taste, and feel like the real thing. In other words, they’re trying to live up to the industry standard set by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.

Hormel is one of a growing list of CPGs launching such products. Tyson announced its Raised & Rooted brand of plant-based meat alternatives this past June. Nestle is selling meatless meat patties to QSR chains in Europe and Israel. And just yesterday, Kelloggs-owned MorningStar Farms announced its own new line of more meat-like, plant-based products called Incogmeato.

These companies have long histories in the food industry, but as The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb pointed out when reporting on the MorningStar news, that could be more hindrance than help. As evidenced by events like Beyond selling out of its meatless chicken wings in less than five hours, consumers are flocking to trendy upstart brands in the alt-meat space who can tout health and environmental benefits and don’t have a history of selling SPAM in grocery store aisles. Like Kellogg, Tyson, and others, Hormel is one more company that will have to find a way to leap the divide between its legacy products and consumer demand for new and different ways to do meatless meat.

This Avocado Pop-Up Event Is More Proof Food Companies Need Instagram Strategies

If you’re like me, interacting with a bus full of avocados sounds like the perfect way to spend an afternoon. And if you happen to be on the West Coast this summer, you’ll get that opportunity.

Wholly Guacamole, maker of all-natural avocado-based dips and spreads, will take its products on the road this summer for the Guaclandia Tour 2018, which offers an “Instagram-able Avocado Experience” (via Food and Wine).

Guaclandia will travel to select U.S. cities handing out unlimited free samples of Wholly Guacamole products and providing endless photo-ops for fans. According to a release, features to interact with will include a chair shaped like an avocado pit, a retro claw machine full of tote bags, pins, and pool floats, and an avocado-inspired wall for snapping selfies. There’s also a swimming pool, a jumbo ball pit, and “tips on ‘keepin’ it real,” which presumably has to do with food.

Ten years ago, the concept might have seemed ridiculous to many, but in 2018, a traveling avocado circus that encourages people to snap and post pictures actually amounts to a clever branding scheme for a food company. As I wrote last year, Instagram is already an influential platform when it comes to small(ish) businesses gaining visibility and spreading awareness of a particular food culture. And avocados are definitely a food culture at this point, for better and for worse. And as Catherine Lamb recently said, these “delicious, weird, and informative food-focused Instagrams” keep us inspired.

Plus, Guaclandia is hardly the first time a food company’s taken its show on the road. The Museum of Ice Cream launched in 2016 in NYC. Still going strong, it features things like an inflatable pool filled with sprinkles, hula-hooping, and the Limbo. The photos I’ve seen also trigger my taste buds for ice cream and pastel colors. You can catch it right now in San Francisco.

Frozen food maker Birdseye got in the game even earlier, in 2014, when it opened a temporary London restaurant featuring a pay-by-picture concept. In other words, diners settled their bill by snapping a picture of their meal and posting it with the hashtag #BirdsEyeInspirations. They even had a professional food photographer at the event, to offer tips and tutorials on how to take the best Instagram photos.

Even restaurants are getting onboard. Recently London-based Jones and Sons teamed up with Knorr, whose software suggests recipes to indecisive eaters. This past April, the two unveiled “Eat Your Feed,” a pop-up that let attendees connect their Instagrams to Knorr’s software, which would then scan the feeds and create a menu based off the photos.

These pop-ups have met with varying success rates. The Museum of Ice Cream, for example, really is as fun as it sounds. And while I wasn’t there for the Birdseye event, frozen vegetables seems a way less appealing sell, even when dinner comes at the mere cost of a picture. Wholly Guacamole has an advantage in that its pushing a product that’s both a bonafide trend and, in this company’s case, a fairly healthy product focused on another current food movement: real ingredients.

So if that plus a mobile Instagram party sounds like a win, check the dates to see where you can keep it real this summer.