Veganism in vogue

Veganism in vogue

Plant-based meat alternatives are rising in popularity as veganism itself becomes more mainstream.

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Meat-free is cool. And the new science of food.
Veganism, once a niche subculture, is rising in popularity. Even regular meat eaters are embracing Veganuary, in which participants eschew meat for the month of January. Luckily for those who’ve committed to Veganuary this year, there’s never been a better time to eat vegan. While applying science to food isn’t all that new, its use to support socially, environmentally conscious diets and tap consumer markets accordingly is. Powered by new tech, vegan foods are cropping up everywhere, including at CES and many of the major fast food chains, making it easier than ever to find vegan food options that are delicious, nutritious, and mimic an omnivore’s palate.

This week, we’re also considering the implications of the proliferation of Ring doorbells, diving into Big Tech’s pursuit of humanlike AI (a contest that’s likely to determine which company becomes the most valuable company of the 2040s), and learning how companies can build consumer communities.

We hope you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and would love any feedback (erica@nycmedialab.org). Thank you again for reading!

Best,
Erica Matsumoto
NYC Media Lab

Veganism is becoming big business. In 2019, retail sales of plant-based foods grew 11% to reach a $4.5 billion market value. In contrast, the total U.S. retail food market grew only 2% over the same period, suggesting that plant-based foods are a major growth driver for food retailers.

Mainstreaming meat alternatives
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are likely the major vegan meat companies you’ve heard of recently. Both companies have recently inked massive deals with major fast food chains to offer their alternative meat patties in burgers, tacos and more.

If you need proof of vegan food’s rise, consider just a few of 2019’s major vegan fast food launches:

• Subway introduced the Beyond Meatball Marinara at 600 stores in the U.S. and Canada
• Quizno’s added vegan corned beef made by California-based Mrs. Goldfarb’s UnReal Deli to its menu
• Burger King introduced the Impossible Whopper in more than 7,000 locations throughout the U.S. on August 8. In a testament to the product’s
• Dunkin’ introduced the Beyond Breakfast Sandwich, featuring a vegan sausage patty, egg and cheese on an English muffin nationwide after a successful trial in 163 Manhattan locations
• CKE-owned Carl’s Jr. and Hardees both added Beyond Meat products to their breakfast menus
• Del Taco launched Beyond Meet beefy crumbles, which wound up becoming one of the company’s most successful launches ever. In June, Del Taco also added a burrito featuring Beyond Meat’s vegan crumbles to its menu
• Red Robin launched the Impossible Burger in all its U.S. locations

In addition to these launches, many other fast food brands trialed vegan products last year:

• When KFC conducted a one-day trial of vegan chicken in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ontario, Canada using Beyond Meat in the U.S. and Lightlife chicken in Canada, both products sold out before the end of the day
• Pizza Hut tested vegan meat topping made by MorningStar Farms in Phoenix, Arizona

Vegan food isn’t limited to fast food and Beyond Meat, either. Ben & Jerry’s, in partnership with Netflix, has launched a vegan peanut butter-flavored ice cream, Netflix & Chill’d. Although this isn’t Ben & Jerry’s first vegan flavor (the brand has several nondairy flavors), the brand’s partnership with Netflix on vegan ice cream is nonetheless significant, as it indicates just how broad veganism’s appeal is.

Source: Live Kindly

In fact, vegan food’s rising popularity is such that, in 2019, 1 in 4 new food products launched in the U.K. was a vegan food product.

Veganism’s rising cachet is evident in pop culture, as well. For this year’s Oscars, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (WME), a talent agency representing 2020 Oscar Best Actor nominee Joaquin Phoenix, will be serving an all-vegan menu as its Oscar’s pre-party. This marks the first time a talent agency has served exclusively plant-based food at a pre-Oscars party. Some awards shows — including the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards and Screen Actors Guild Awards — have completely removed animal products from this year’s ceremonies as well.

Vegan naysayers
Not everyone is fully onboard the veganism train. Some research suggests that a vegan diet may not be the healthiest one for most people. Instead, some studies suggest that mixed diets are better than plant-based ones, especially if those plant-based diets are high in carbohydrates and heavily processed food (such as many vegan meat substitutes).

Other skeptics of veganism argue that it’s not de facto “kind to animals,” insofar as farming as an industry uses massive volumes of pesticides that kill all manner of small animals. The Financial Times’ Merryn Somerset Webb observes, “If you care about each individual living thing, you should perhaps eat nothing but one-and-a-half organic pasture-fed cows a year (I’m assuming 2,000 calories a day) rather than risk being complicit in the deaths of a great many more than one-and-a-half spiders in the course of living off grains. Tricky, isn’t it?”

Who’s Watching Your Porch? Thanks to Ring, millions of Americans now know what’s happening on their porches at any given time. As a result, they — and law enforcement through a service called Neighbors Portal — have unprecedented insight into the behavior of neighbors, family members, delivery personnel and others. The myriad privacy and security implications of smart doorbells’ proliferation are worth considering, especially in light of the fact that smart doorbell sales alone increased 58% from January 2019 to January 2020. 8 min read Inside big tech’s quest for human-level A.I. Tech giants, including Alphabet and Microsoft, are making aggressive investments in hopes of being the first to develop human-level A.I. When — and it seems that it’s a matter of “when,” not “if” — such technology arrives, it could radically reshape the business world. Odds are, the winner of the humanlike A.I. race will be the world’s most valuable in 20 years’ time.

AI is already evolving at a stunning pace. The following graphic shows the incredible decrease in the amount of time it took to train an A.I. model to match a person’s accuracy at identifying images of 1,000 different kinds of objects from October 2017 (10 days, 3:59:59) to May 2019 (02:43).

Source: Stanford University via Fortune 20 min read Turn Your Customers Into Your Community

Over the past decade, companies have steadily and inexorably lost control over how and when consumers interact with their products and services. Given this challenge, it’s more important than ever for brands to convert consumers into a community of loyal repeat purchasers by building products within their communities.

In order to achieve this aim, companies should follow three key rules:

1. Trust consumers and treat consumer communication and feedback as a two-way street
2. Start by asking who the company is building products and services for, rather than what the company should be building or providing
3. Consider sustained collaborations rather than short-term investments in order to develop deep connections with the community

9 min read This Week in Business History

January 20, 1870: Woodhull, Claflin & Co. opens its doors on Wall Street

This is the first stock brokerage in the U.S. (and likely the world) run solely by women. It wound up becoming very successful thanks to its shrewd proprietors, sisters Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Tennessee Celeste Claflin. The sisters partly owed their success to their showmanship background (their family ran a traveling medicine and fortunetelling show) and partly to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s sponsorship.

Profits from the brokerage went towards the formation of a women’s rights and reform magazine, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. This was among the first women-published newspapers. It covered articles on a broad range of topics, including women’s suffrage, spiritualism, vegetarianism, free love and socialism. Throughout its existence, the paper primarily promoted Woodhull’s political and reform ambitions; when she ran for president in 1872, it was her primary propaganda vehicle.

On December 30, 1871, the Weekly was the first U.S. publication to publish Karl Marx’s and Frederich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto in English.

At its height, the Weekly boasted a national circulation of 20,000.

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