Expect to see retailers selling more 'green' meatballs instead of fake meat, the founders of one of the world's biggest vegan recipe channels say

• You might see less plant-based meat amid rising concerns about ultra-processed foods.
• The founders of Bosh! said stores and restaurants are focusing more on green meatballs and bean burgers.

The duo behind vegan recipe channel and cookbook series Bosh! expect retailers to start stocking more "green" meatballs and bean burgers in place of fake-meat products amid rising concerns about ultra-processed foods.

"We're at the start of a year or two where we're going to see the impacts of these ultra-processed concerns hitting supermarket shelves," Henry Firth, who along with Ian Theasby founded the media brand in 2016, told Business Insider.

"We're seeing a lot of buyers explore veg-forward or veg-first, whether that's just focusing on recipes, like food-service people wanting to celebrate the veg rather than have these meat mimics, or whether it's supermarket buyers actually looking to procure products that look more like bean burgers," Firth said.

Plant-based meats are generally regarded as healthier than meat products because they're typically lower in fat and higher in fiber. But they're often heavily processed and contain more sodium to boost both their flavor and shelf life.

Consumers should expect to see more "meatballs that are green instead of looking like meat" and that contain vegetables like spinach or kale alongside soy protein, Firth said.

"We're not sure that the demand is going to be there for those products," Firth said. "Do people actually want to eat a green meatball? We don't know. But what we do know is people are interested in stocking them."

Firth added that he expected plant-based meat manufacturers to increasingly focus on having cleaner labels by reducing the number of ingredients.

As part of the move toward cleaner eating, there's more interest from supermarket buyers in products like tofu and tempeh, too, Firth said. "They're only as processed as yogurt," he said. "It's really cultured rather than processed."

Just one bad experience can put a person off plant-based meat

Plant-based eating surged during the pandemic when "everybody was thinking about lentils on their shelf" and vegan food has less of a stigma now, Firth said. There are now so many manufacturers of plant-based food that "you could say there's too much availability, you could say that now you don't know which brand to pick," he said.

But with the cost-of-living crisis, people are opting for cheaper products that might be lower quality, Firth said.

"When people have a poor first taste of a plant meat, they will remember that and they will tell their friends, 'I tried one of those burgers. I thought it was disgusting.' That first taste is so important," he said.

The quality of plant-based meat varies massively between brands, which is why so many restaurants and fast-food outlets emphasize which brands their plant-based dishes are made with, Firth said.

"If you go to a pub and they don't tell you what their vegan patty is, it's a gamble and it could be wonderful, but it also could just be made in-house," he said.

Plant-based milk and meat have become much more readily available in recent years, but vegan cheese is where more development is needed, Theasby said.

"I think the last bastion of plant-based food really is cheese," Theasby said. "Cheese is something that people really love, they get really passionate about. Vegan cheese at the moment is good, but it can be better. I think that is definitely a product category that will get better in the very near future."

The duo have released six cookbooks as well as a guide to vegan living and sell a range of products at UK grocery stores. Bosh! has also just launched a partnership with Costa Coffee, the UK's largest coffee-shop chain with more than 2,600 stores, to sell eight plant-based items, including a fajita wrap and rocky road.

"Our company mission is to, quite simply, put more plants on plates," Theasby said. The best way to do that is by partnering with companies that can distribute food on a wide scale, he said.

Another way to encourage more people to eat plant-based diets is by developing "accidentally vegan" food, like apple pies that don't contain any dairy, Firth said.

"I think for anything that doesn't actively hero meat, we are in a place now where everything can be made to a vegan recipe," Firth said. "So I think moving forward we'd like to see more plant-based options that don't even have to shout about being plant-based or vegan. They're just accidentally vegan."