But it’s still not much.
It can be hard to keep up with the plant-based food industry. Every month seems to bring buzzy product launches and press releases from startups about the millions of dollars they’ve raised from investors. At the same time, big-name traditional food companies continue to launch their own lines of dairy- and meat-free foods at a rapid clip.
Each year the Plant Based Foods Association and the Good Food Institute — the two main groups that advocate for meat and dairy alternatives — publish a state of the industry of sorts, analyzing how these products actually perform in grocery stores. It’s a useful zoom-out that helps put the blitz of plant-based food development into perspective.
Their latest report looked at 2020 sales figures and found that — as with the previous year — plant-based food retail sales grew much faster (27 percent) than the total US retail food market (15 percent). And this wasn’t just on the coasts; there was more than 25 percent growth in all US census regions.
Plant-based meat sales grew by 45 percent and plant-based milk sales were up 20 percent from 2019.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22446103/Total_U.S._plant_based_food_dollar_sales_and_growth_GFI.jpg)
SPINS, The Plant Based Foods Association, The Good Food Institute
The growth may be eye-popping, but there’s a big caveat here: Supermarkets had an unusually good year. Early in the pandemic, panic-buying sent grocery sales surging, and earnings remained high throughout 2020 as people cooked at home more to avoid crowds and save money, giving the sales of both plant-based and animal-based foods a big bump.
Another important caveat: The plant-based food category is starting from a very low baseline. A 45 percent increase in plant-based meat sales over one year is a big deal, but it can be brought back down to earth by a grim, stubborn fact: More than 99 percent of the meat we eat in the US still comes from animals.
But this continued year-after-year growth at the very least shows there is growing demand for alternatives.
Plant-based is now more than a trend
In the mid- to late 2010s, it was common for journalists and market research groups to predict plant-based as the next big trend. Years later, it’s clear that it’s more than a trend — it’s a sizable sector of the food industry, especially alternative dairy, which is becoming less and less alternative.
Fifteen percent of fluid milk sales in retail are now plant-based, plant-based butter is at 7 percent, and plant-based coffee creamer 6 percent. Some subcategories of plant-based meat are getting more and more consumer dollars, too — for example, 2.7 percent of packaged meat sales are now plant-based. To be clear, these figures are for sales, not volume. Since plant-based products tend to cost more than their animal-derived counterparts, the actual volume of plant-based milk and packaged meat that Americans are picking up at the grocery store is likely a good amount lower than 15 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively.
Despite the relatively small share of grocery dollars spent on plant-based foods, investors are confident that alternative proteins will continue to capture more and more of the overall food industry. Last month, GFI reported that in 2020 alone, the alternative protein sector raised $3.1 billion from investors. That’s more than half of all the money raised in this space over the past decade. Much of the $3.1 billion went to big names like Impossible Foods and Oatly, but many newer companies got a boost, too.
It will take many years to see if this investment — a lot of it likely to be used on R&D — pays off, but it sets up the industry to make headway on its biggest challenges: bringing down the cost of plant-based products, making them taste better, and making them more widely available.
On the price and availability front, Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Eat Just have continually lowered prices while getting into more and more grocery stores (and restaurant chains) — though not quite enough to bring in lower-income consumers.
Compared to the popularity of meatless burgers and sausages (the products the biggest plant-based food companies have focused on), consumers aren’t buying a lot of plant-based chicken or fish alternatives, which is bad news for chickens and fish, as they’re killed in the highest numbers and typically raised in the worst conditions.
Better news for animals is the rise of plant-based eggs, which saw sales grow by 168 percent from 2019 to 2020. But more so than any other subcategory mentioned here, plant-based eggs were starting from an especially low baseline — Eat Just’s liquid plant-based egg only became widely available in late 2020, with practically no predecessors (or competitors).
Who’s buying plant-based food?
In addition to looking at in-store sales, PBFA and GFI also commissioned a consumer survey to look at who’s buying plant-based foods at the supermarket. They found that households with under $35,000 in income spend the least on these foods, while a little more than half of all money spent on plant-based foods comes from households making over $70,000 a year (the US median household income is $68,703).
Those who are purchasing plant-based foods the most? Consumers ages 35 to 44, consumers with graduate degrees, households with children, and households with income over $100,000.
This data underscores the importance of plant-based companies’ efforts to lower prices, and suggest that more companies ought to try to make plant-based meat as cheap as possible from the get-go, rather than creating an expensive, high-demand product at first in the hope it can scale and become affordable over time, the approach taken by most startups so far.
The survey also found that people of color overindexed on plant-based purchasing, meaning they were both more likely to buy plant-based foods and spend more on plant-based foods compared to the consumer panel, whereas white consumers underindexed.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22446125/image__1_.png)
SPINS, The Plant Based Foods Association, The Good Food Institute
This is not too surprising. A 2018 US Gallup poll found that nonwhite Americans were three times as likely as white Americans to identify as vegetarian, which could suggest that non-vegetarian people of color are more likely to buy plant-based food than non-vegetarian white people.
Overall, the share of households purchasing plant-based products went up only 4 percentage points since last year. Impressively, though, over half of American households reported buying a meat or dairy alternative in 2020 although only a small percentage of Americans identify as vegetarian or vegan. This could be caused, in part, by the widespread adoption of the term “plant-based” on package labeling — as opposed to “vegan” or “vegetarian” — as research has shown people are less likely to purchase food when it has a “v” word on it.
According to the report, the percentage of “plant-based” claims on packaging more than doubled last year compared to 2019. I’ve even seen this “plant-based” halo effect cross over to retail categories outside of food. Take, for example, Tide’s “plant-based” laundry detergent (I just hope nobody mistakes it for food).
It might be the case that non-vegetarians read “vegetarian” on a food package and dismiss it as something that isn’t for them, whereas “plant-based” is a more vague term, and rarely used as an identity.
The plant-based industry may be small, but that’s because it’s so new
These annual reports are released with a hefty dose of enthusiasm and optimism, which is warranted given how quickly the plant-based food sector is growing (and no surprise given the source).
But they also show just how far plant-based producers and advocates still have to go to achieve the enormous goal they’re setting out to accomplish: fundamentally changing how humanity has produced meat and milk for decades.
To do that, the plant-based food industry will need to see many consecutive years of significant growth before it can start to bring down the number of animals raised in factory farms.
That’s not happening, at least yet — meat consumption continues to rise slowly in the US while it explodes around the globe. But it’s also worth remembering that this new generation of the plant-based food industry is still in its infancy; it was only a couple of years ago when the sector’s biggest players even got their products on grocery store shelves.
It’ll be a while until we see if their efforts to transform the food industry gain serious ground. But the continual progress is encouraging.
America has officially blamed the Russian government for the hack of multiple federal agencies.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19433750/open_sourced_story_logo.png){kind=logo}
The Biden administration has officially blamed and sanctioned Russia for its role in the massive SolarWinds hack that compromised computer systems in multiple government agencies as well as private companies.
In an executive order issued April 15, President Biden levied a variety of economic sanctions against several Russian financial institutions, technology companies, and individuals designated as having participated in “harmful foreign activities,” including but not limited to the hack.
In a short speech addressing today’s actions, Biden said his administration concluded that the Russian government “interfered in our elections” and was behind the “totally inappropriate” SolarWinds hack.
Biden said he spoke with Russian president Putin on Wednesday to tell him about the measures, but also hoped that the countries would have a stable and productive relationship moving forward, possibly with the two leaders meeting in person for a summit in the summer.
“I was clear with President Putin that we could have gone further, but I chose not to do so,” Biden said. “Now is the time to de-escalate.”
First reported last December, the series of attacks, linked to software made by the Texas-based software company SolarWinds, infiltrated at least nine federal agencies, including the Commerce, Energy, and Justice Departments, as well as more than 100 private companies, the Biden administration said in February. Officials were initially hesitant to assign blame for the hack — or even acknowledge its existence — under the Trump administration, but they would eventually say the attack was “likely Russian in origin.” Trump said very little and even suggested that China, not Russia, might have been behind it. Russia has always denied any involvement.
The hacks are believed to have begun in March 2020 through network monitoring software called Orion Platform, which is made by SolarWinds. The hackers were able to insert malware into Orion Platform software updates which, once installed, gave hackers access to those systems. This is called a supply chain attack. At one point, there were fears that the attack affected thousands of SolarWinds’ government and private clients. The hack was only discovered when a cybersecurity company that makes hacking tools found that its own systems had been breached.
In contrast to his predecessor, Biden — then as a president-elect — said his administration would do everything possible to improve its own cybersecurity defenses, which the hack made clear were very much lacking, and that the breach would be a “top priority.” Biden also promised “substantial costs” for the perpetrators.
Four months later, the Biden administration is formally naming the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) — which it says includes the groups known as Cozy Bear, APT29, and The Dukes — as being behind the hack. That group has also been blamed for previous hacks on government systems, the Democratic National Committee, and even institutions doing research on Covid-19 and vaccine development. It’s long been linked to Russian intelligence, which Russia has long denied.
The National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also released on April 15 a cybersecurity advisory about the vulnerabilities Russian hackers have exploited — and continue to exploit, as the advisory notably pointed out — in software from companies including Fortinet, Synacor, Pulse Secure, Citrix, and VMware. (Pulse Secure told Recode that the issue identified in its software has since been patched.)
Biden’s executive order doesn’t just address the hack or Russia’s other cyber malfeasances. It also says the Russian government has tried to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and its allies, targeted dissidents and journalists, and violated international law by refusing to respect other nation-states’ territorial integrity. The sanctions will also apply to individuals associated with the occupation of Crimea; reports that the Russian government paid bounties to Taliban militants to kill American soldiers will be “handled through diplomatic, military and intelligence channels”; and 10 Russians who work at the country’s diplomatic mission in Washington have been expelled.
Russia’s response to the executive order, for now, is to promise that there will be a response.
“Such aggressive behavior will certainly receive a decisive rebuff, and the response to sanctions will be inevitable,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a Russian news agency.
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
Biden’s sanctions and expulsion of Russian diplomats won’t stop many of Moscow’s worst aggressions. But the sanctions he didn’t impose yet might.
Russia can’t seem to quit antagonizing the United States and its friends. In just the past year, the Kremlin hacked its way into the computer systems of the US government and Fortune 500 companies, interfered in the 2020 election, and amassed a large military force on Ukraine’s border.
As punishment, President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a series of measures designed to, as the White House put it, “defend our national interests and impose costs for Russian Government actions that seek to harm us.”
Those measures include sanctioning six Russian technology firms that support the Russian intelligence service’s cyber program; 32 entities and individuals involved in election interference and disinformation campaigns; limits on US financial interaction with Russia’s sovereign debt; and, in coordination with allies, eight figures “associated” with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The US also expelled 10 diplomats from Moscow’s embassy in Washington, DC, and officially blamed the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (known as the SVR) for hacking SolarWinds software to spy on American officials and businesses.
The US surely took or will take covert action, too. Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the administration’s message that Russia would suffer “consequences, some unseen and some seen” for its many aggressions. It’s unclear what that might be, but experts assume a cyberattack is most likely.
Any way you look at it, this is a significant decision by Biden that most analysts say will cause real pain to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies. “This is definitely the biggest sanctions action toward Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014,” said Edward Fishman, a former State Department sanctions official.
The real question, though, isn’t whether Russia will suffer financially from these measures, but whether they will compel Putin to end his aggressions toward the US and its friends.
The consensus among Democrats, Republicans, and current and former US government officials I spoke to: They won’t.
“These sanctions are punitive and will hurt the Russian economy, but they don’t provide any inducement for better behavior,” Angela Stent, who served as the US national intelligence officer for Russia from 2004 to 2006, told me.
After an address about his Russia actions later in the day, a reporter asked if Putin gave him any indication that he’d change his behavior. Biden didn’t say “yes,” but he did say that in conversations “I urged him to respond appropriately, not to exceed, because we can move as well.”
That doesn’t mean the measures are feckless. Biden may have found a larger strategic reason to hold back: making clear to Putin that if he continues to threaten America and its friends — namely Ukraine — he’ll face worse punishments. Much worse.
Biden’s Russia punishments are big. He could’ve gone bigger.
Top Democrats clearly want the White House to go further than it did to castigate Putin.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, separately called the sanctions and expulsion package a “first step.”
A Democratic Congressional aide summed up the general feeling in the party like this: “This was quite a punch in the face [to Russia], but we need a combo.”
They believe the US could have done a lot more to inflict real pain on Putin and Russia.
Tim Morrison, who served as President Donald Trump’s top National Security Council official for Europe, has a few ideas in mind.
Biden could’ve sanctioned companies building the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Moscow sees the 95 percent completed pipeline as a way to make money, and Berlin sees it as a much-needed energy delivery system. But Washington, under both Trump and Biden, views the pipeline as a naked effort by the Kremlin to extend its influence into the heart of Europe.
If the US had sanctioned the many firms involved in construction, as mandated by Congress, it would deal a big blow to Putin. “Kill it,” Morrison told me. “Kill it now.” However, the Biden administration is looking to appoint a Nord Stream 2 special envoy with the express purpose of making sure the pipeline is never finished.
Biden was asked why he didn’t place sanctions over Nord Stream 2 during his Thursday afternoon address. It’s “a complicated issue affecting our allies in Europe,” the president responded, adding “that still is an issue that is in play.”
Morrison, who’s now at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, DC, also said Biden should have closed all five Russian consulates in the US.
Those tougher actions would show Putin the US was really serious about stopping him.
“We’re holding things back. We shouldn’t be holding things back. It’s going to be perceived by Putin as what it is: unserious,” Morrison told me. Putin is “a dime-store magician, not a strategic genius, but he can read people. That’s why he’s still alive.”
That Biden didn’t go as far as he could have means Putin is unlikely to stop the cyber espionage, election interference, and other actions that put him on America’s bad side.
The latest measures “are unlikely to change Putin’s calculations in any fundamental way,” said John Sipher, who formerly ran the CIA’s Russia operations. “Putin will continue to use asymmetric means to damage the West, and he has the tools and experience to weather any domestic economic or political damage created by the sanctions.”
But why not do everything Morrison prescribed and see if that would work? The reason, experts tell me, is that Biden thinks he can make Putin hesitate before authorizing the worst actions.
A “sword of Damocles” now hangs over Putin
Fishman, the former US sanctions official now at the Atlantic Council think tank in DC, explained that sometimes the sanctions and punishments you don’t use can be more effective than the ones you do.
“Sanctions are most impactful as a threat, before they’re imposed, to deter future actions by another government,” he told me. “What Biden is showing is he’s not going to hold back when it comes to sanctions against Russia, but he has more arrows in his quiver.”
In other words, Putin not only has to deal with the fallout of these imposed penalties but also has to worry about future reprimands should he push Biden too far.
That “sword of Damocles,” as Fishman called it, comes in real handy right now. Russia has tens of thousands of troops and a convoy of tanks near Ukraine’s border. The concern is Putin may be gearing up for yet another invasion of the country, designed to bolster the Kremlin-aligned forces who’ve been fighting in Ukraine since 2014.
Such a possibility is certainly weighing on Biden’s mind. In a Tuesday call with Putin, Biden “emphasized the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” per a White House readout. “The President voiced our concerns over the sudden Russian military build-up in occupied Crimea and on Ukraine’s borders, and called on Russia to de-escalate tensions.”
If Biden had used up every sanctions and diplomatic option available to him, Putin may have just gone ahead and invaded Ukraine anyway because he’d have no further moves to fear, experts said. There’s always the chance of Biden authorizing direct military action or pushing to get Ukraine in NATO, but experts believe those would be steps too far — and Putin knows that.
Biden keeping more options in the holster, then, was the right move for the time being.
“Everything Putin has done merits stronger sanctions,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former top Pentagon official for Russia in the Obama administration. “But when we’re talking about ongoing foreign policy and diplomacy, this makes sense to me.”
There’s more Biden is trying to communicate with these measures, said Sipher, the former CIA agent. “This effort has a symbolic effect in that it makes clear that the new administration plans to focus on the Kremlin’s malign behavior, and Putin needs to assume that the Biden administration will consider future and stronger pushback.”
All told, Putin is unlikely to ever stop trying to weaken the US wherever he can, regardless of what the US does to him, his cronies, or his country. But if the Biden administration can at least stop Putin from doing the worst — like a larger invasion of a US partner nation in Europe — then these and the threat of further penalties would prove a success.
“These new sanctions are pretty kick-ass,” Farkas said.