Simo Ellilä is CEO and co-founder of Enifer, a Finnish foodtech company spun out of the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) in 2020. With over a decade of experience in biorefining and agrifood by-product upcycling, he has led industry projects across Europe and Latin America and delivered keynotes at events such as Slush and the Shift Business Festival.
In this op-ed, Ellilä argues that the alternative protein industry’s post-hype correction is not a collapse but a maturation, and that the sector’s next phase will be won by companies focused on health utility rather than ideological appeal.
The alternative protein industry is no longer in its honeymoon phase.
Valuations have fallen, consumer excitement has cooled, and some of the category’s most visible brands have struggled to justify the hype. The years when talking heads treated alternative proteins as the inevitable future of food are over. But while some have framed it as a collapse, it is more accurately understood as a correction.
So what happened? Technological promise and consumer reality collided. Some initially popular products ultimately failed to deliver on taste, texture, and nutrition. Others became caught in the backlash against ultra-processed food. At the same time, inflation and rising living costs have pushed consumers away from novelty and toward reliability. Under those conditions, asking mainstream shoppers to embrace unfamiliar new formats was always going to be a harder sell than the early narrative suggested.
But the end of the hype moment is not the end of the category. If anything, this may be the point at which alternative protein becomes a more serious market force. To do that, alternative protein producers must recognize that consumer motivation is shifting.
The first wave of alternative protein was powered largely by collective ideals around sustainability, animal welfare, and the promise of a better food system. The next wave is less driven by collective ideology and more by personal choice: people are looking for healthy options that are good for them in immediate, practical ways. In that sense, alternative protein is entering a less ideal-driven market, shaped by a more grounded question: not “who are we?” but “what is the best choice for me?
The end of the honeymoon
The first wave of alternative protein suffered from a basic mismatch between narrative and reality. The story was enormous: this was the future of food, the answer to emissions, animal agriculture, and modern consumer demand all at once.
But for many people, the products themselves did not live up to that scale of promise. They were often too expensive, overengineered, nutritionally ambiguous, or simply underwhelming in terms of taste and texture. Recent research from the Good Food Institute ultimately said that, among consumers who had bought plant-based meat before but not in the past year, only 36% would repurchase if taste and texture matched conventional meat – survivable for a niche category, but not for the mainstream.
The problem was not just that some products disappointed, but that the category arrived with the burden of being both a consumer product and a cultural symbol. Buying into alternative protein was framed not merely as trying something new, but as participating in a broader shift in values.
From aspiration to tradeoff
Those kinds of cultural and ideological associations helped energize early adopters, especially those already motivated by plant-based food movements or sustainability concerns. But they were a fragile foundation for a mass market.
As the category moved beyond early adopters, consumers began judging these products less as expressions of values and more by the standards they apply to everyday food: taste, price, nutrition, and how processed they seemed. The broader economic backdrop only reinforced that shift. Under that kind of scrutiny, alternative proteins increasingly came to look less like an ethical upgrade and more like a potential health tradeoff.
That shift has been evident in consumer behavior. In 2025, IFIC found that 80% of Americans consider whether a food has been processed before buying it, and familiarity with the term “ultraprocessed food” rose by more than 10% from 2024 to 2025. And in Food Frontier’s 2024 consumer survey, 46% of respondents cited poor taste as a barrier to buying plant-based meats again, while 37% cited high price, and 31% said the products felt too processed.
What do all these numbers add up to? A reality check. The hype has given way to actual consumer behavior, and the market is beginning to separate attention from adoption. Importantly, this does not necessarily mean consumers have abandoned the idea of eating less meat. Gallup found that 23% of Americans said they were eating less meat than a year earlier, even though only 4% identified as vegetarian and 1% as vegan, suggesting a shift away from ideological food choices toward more pragmatic ones.
A more practical future
What matters now is not whether consumers like the idea of alternative protein, but whether they want to eat it again tomorrow.
On that front, preferences are fairly clear. Protein remains one of the strongest forces in food: in IFIC’s 2025 Food & Health Survey, 70% of Americans said they are trying to consume more protein, making it the fifth straight year that protein has ranked as the nutrient people most want in their diets.
This shift is already visible across the supermarket, where protein is no longer confined to shakes, bars, or meat alternatives, but increasingly part of baked goods, cereals, and pastas – pantry staples people know and love.
In this environment, the winning companies may not be the ones making the loudest claims about changing the world. They may be the ones building ingredients that make food work better: Instead of asking shoppers to adopt a new food identity, simply meeting them where they already are.
That is what a more mature alternative protein market looks like: a migration from ideology-led consumption to utility- and health-led adoption.
The post-hype era may be less glamorous than the one that came before it, but it is also more durable. In food, mass adoption rarely begins with moral aspiration alone. It begins when products make people feel that they are a better fit for their own lives, health, and habits.
