Beyond Meat recently announced multi-year partnerships with McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. Soon ultra-processed meat analogues will find their way onto the menus of an additional 88,500+ quick service restaurant (QSR) locations across the world. Even for those who don’t buy that option, its placement on the menu boards represents an endorsement of sorts. It’s a free set of billboards that legitimizes the product: In making these long-term deals, the world’s largest QSRs are confirming mock meat to be more than just a fad. What is also clear is that these partnerships, paired with an increasingly negative description of animal agriculture, move us closer to a potential tipping point for meat.

Made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the concept represents the definitive moment the unexpected becomes the expected and accepted. In the case of meat, the tipping point is a shift in society where eating animals becomes a faux pas.

This does not mean meat will suddenly evaporate from store shelves or freezers. Public opinion is downstream from culture. And buying behaviors are even further downstream. If public opinion continues to signal a shift — e.g., smart people don’t smoke cigarettes — then consumer behavior will continue to evolve. And while fake meat companies have collaborated with QSRs before, this huge deal represents a larger cultural shift.

Yogi Berra famously quipped that “you can observe a lot by just watching.” Today anyone can watch how radical interests are trying to push meat out of public favor. Anti-meat activists look to the “tobacco playbook” for how to marginalize a widely used product.

This involves several elements already in evidence. One is a public health argument: Rather than secondhand smoke being a public risk, we hear meat production is causing climate change. Another mimics the personal health argument that meat is bad for you. A third element is sin taxes to suppress consumption — which some observers believe are imminent on meat.

There are flaws to all these arguments as they concern meat. Most anti-meat studies don’t account for other lifestyle habits. Most are based on surveys asking someone their food selections from a week, a month, or a year ago. (Do you know what you had for dinner three weeks ago?) What’s more, as most in the meat industry know, animal agriculture accounts for only a smidgen of America’s emissions. Research has shown that if the entire country went vegan overnight, emissions would reduce only 2.6%.

Accordingly, we are smug in the belief of no possible shift in the American love affair with bacon, burgers and wings. Conversely, Steve Ballmer, the former visionary and CEO of Microsoft predicted, “There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” Industry vision is not always 20/20.

The industry must stop thinking or waiting for the right time to act. Social media and its influencers are catalyzing the public’s falling out with meat. If you need precedent for culture and opinion shifts beyond tobacco, the fake milk industry is an apt example.

When plant-based milk first appeared on the market, the dairy industry considered it a fad, a nuisance not worth addressing beyond ads with milk mustaches. The results are clear: The nuisance left unaddressed became a problem. Plant-based milk continues to gain market share, reaching about 15% today.

Consumer perception of milk has likewise changed. A 2018 Ipsos poll found 59% of respondents who bought both cow and fake milk thought fake milk was just as or more nutritious than cow’s milk.

Meat has not hit the tipping point yet, but it’s impossible to know exactly when it will occur. The only way to know that date is with hindsight. Those willing to engage are faced with only two choices: too early or too late. Like a cancer check, there’s no downside to being early. But it’s too expensive and nearly impossible to change behaviors after passing the tipping point.

The (Cow) Tipping Point

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