The Maginot Line of armed fortifications was built in WWII so that the French could not be directly attacked by Germany as the country had been in WWI. To that end, it was a successful strategy. The Germans did not attack France directly; rather, they maneuvered around the Maginot Line and arrived via Belgium, taking over France inside of six weeks.

The strategy is an oft-studied case in military — and corporate — strategy. France, and most executives, reprise strategies that have worked in their favor in the past. In doing so, they often fail to realize that the current field of battle has moved somewhere else entirely.

Cheerleaders for the conventional meat industry against the growing alternative protein segment won a key case in court recently: Turtle Island Foods SPC, the Hood River, Ore.-based maker of Tofurky, and the Good Food Institute lost its bid in the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for an injunction on a Missouri state law that made "misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry" a crime.

Specifically, the court found that Tofurky in particular clearly labels its products so that the law does not affect the company or its ability to do business. But it leaves in effect the state law, initially passed in 2018, that restricts how alternative protein companies can label their products, even as Turtle Island and GFI pursue their claims that the state labeling restrictions are unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, Mike Deering, executive vice president of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, praised the ruling in a press release issued by the Missouri attorney general’s office. “A bipartisan majority in the [Missouri] General Assembly made clear their intent to ensure marketing with integrity. Attorney General [Eric] Schmitt and his team aggressively defended that intent and farm and ranch families are grateful,” he said.

In 2021, however, the battlefield is somewhere else entirely.

In the Power of Meat Report 2021, 40% of meat-eating respondents who indicated they had dialed down their red meat consumption cited concern over its effect on their health as a reason. This, despite the fact that 76% of all meat-eating respondents agreed that “meat/poultry belong in a healthy, balanced diet.”

A 2019 study conducted by the International Food Information Council noted that, when comparing Nutrition Facts labels, 45% of respondents believed the plant alternative was healthier than animal meat, while 25% believed the plant alternative to be unhealthier. Their perceptions did not change much even when IFIC added the alt-meat products’ often-criticized ingredient list to the materials the respondents reviewed.

The IFIC study echoes other consumer research showing that shoppers, advised that plant-forward and plant-based diets are more nutritious overall, extend that belief to highly processed alternative meat products. This, despite the fact that the individual products vary widely in terms of fat content, sodium levels and protein, and other measures of nutrition.

In other words, alt-meats are winning the communications battle in consumers’ minds. While the conventional meat industry’s supporters fight to keep “meat-related” language off of alt-meat labels — in the U.S. and elsewhere — highlighting the “plant” in “plant-based” has proven to be a powerful selling point for their perceived rivals.

GFI, Tofurky and other companies and organizations have raised First Amendment issues with state alt-meat labeling laws and are expected to continue with those cases. And just this week, Impossible Foods kicked off its first national advertising campaign with the tagline, “We Are Meat” — a move that incensed many meat industry pros.

Those objections are already misdirected. The field of battle is somewhere else entirely.

Are you fighting the last war, or the current one?

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