“Peak meat” … “11% of the market by 2035” … “$290 billion.” The headlines over stories about Boston Consulting Group’s and Blue Horizon’s report, “Food for Thought: The Protein Transformation,” seemed designed to put every link in the meat supply chain on the defensive.

Boston Consulting is no veg-evangelist organization. The well-researched document makes a convincing case — as it should, considering it is intended to attract financial investment to alternative protein companies. Blue Horizon is an investment fund that “aims to transform the global food industry through impact capital and value creation,” according to the report’s introduction.

The firms’ projections, however, do incorporate some key assumptions that are more speculative than the headlines suggest. Among them is the report’s most optimistic scenario that gives alternative proteins a market share of 22% by 2035.

The report assumes, for example, that government regulators around the globe will make decisions in the years to come that will encourage the growth of the alt-proteins market. For sure, governments use subsidies and taxation all the time to encourage market growth in chosen directions, but there's no guarantee those decisions will benefit alt-proteins. So-called meat taxes, for example, are seemingly under discussion in some country all the time, but no such policy has been implemented.

Labelling is another regulatory and legal arena that has become a global battleground in the conventional and alternative proteins markets. In the U.S., the federal regulatory agencies have opted not to propose a national standard for terms that can, or cannot, be used on labels. Meanwhile, alt-meat companies argue that they can use terms such as “meat” or “steak” or “burger” on the label as long as it is clearly also marked as “plant-based” or other type of alternative, while opponents say using such terms on an alternative product confuses consumers. The issue is playing out state-by-state, in the courts. The cases have been ongoing for years and will likely continue for years to come.

The regulatory environment is hardly more predictable in Europe, where the same labelling issues have been argued in various regulatory venues for years.

Cultivated meat? Diners in Singapore can order a cultivated chicken-veggie blended meatball in a restaurant there. It was rolled out just months after the company first sought regulatory approval. But Singapore faces a unique challenge in its goal to provide its own food for citizens in a country with a paltry amount of agricultural assets; it has to move fast. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and USDA unveiled a framework for how they will cooperate on the oversight of the cultivated meat industry here in March 2019; although working groups have been meeting, no public progress has been announced since then.

All's to say, the alt-meat industry can look forward to an innovative and profitable future — but probably not 22% of the market by 2035.

Further 'Food for Thought'

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