Vegan sausage trend may have peaked, says M&S boss

The UK may not have reached “peak veganism”, but the trend for vegan meat substitutes may have already hit a high, according to one retail expert.

In a Q&A with The Times columnist Alice Thomson during this week’s Future Countryside conference at Syon Park, west London, M&S chairman Archie Norman was asked if he believes the country has peaked with veganism.

“No. I don’t think we have,” he replied. “You can see it’s a generational thing. We are going to see more and more people – not necessarily vegan – saying, ‘I just want to eat less meat and I just want to look at vegetable options.”

See also: Is lab-grown meat a threat to traditional livestock farming?

He continued: “I think what we have probably seen is the peak of the vegan sausage.

“In other words, in the early stages, everybody, including M&S, sought to replicate meat products with non-meat solutions and people were discovering you can do that.

“But, firstly it’s sometimes not very healthy, because to make it taste nice you do funny things to it and secondly, it’s better to have a delicious veg product to one that is mimicking a meat product, so I think you’ll see it evolve and move on.”

A few years ago, people got “very excited” about synthetic meat, said Mr Norman. But he added: “A lot of the excitement has gone away with that.”

Archie Norman talking to Alice Thomson at the Future Countryside conference © MAG/Philip Case

Clarkson praised

The former ITV chairman said Jeremy Clarkson had “done wonders for the farming industry” with his Amazon Prime hit TV series Clarkson’s Farm.

“It’s a window into farming that, for some reason, people never quite had through other programmes,” he added.

Thanks to shows like Clarkson’s Farm, Mr Norman predicted that people’s interest in food provenance and sustainable food and regenerative farming would continue to grow.

In France, the French government suspended plans in April for a proposed ban on the use of “meaty” terminology in plant-based meat products after a ruling from the country’s Council of State threw its legality into question.