Rithwik Ramesh, the Co-founder of Alt Co., is known to handle the managerial and financial operations of the brand. He also serves as the Head of Strategy and Planning at Rithwik Projects Pvt.Ltd, one of India’s leading infrastructure development and Management Company. He is an economic and finance graduate from Drexel University and has made a rapport in the field with his extensive experience in the field of finance. Rithwik plays a salient role in the strategic usage of the funds and budgeting of the company.
We are living in a “woke” world with people growing more environmentally conscious by the day. The onset of the pandemic has further fuelled this thought of preserving the environment and the planet, acting as a wake up call and making everyone think twice before depreciating the green cover. With a health conscious and environmentally aware population, if there is one buzz that seems to be mushrooming exponentially – it is people opting for plant-based alternatives.
Plant-based, sorry what?
Plant-based alternatives are not a sampling or a shrub to enhance the air quality at one’s home but rather a lifestyle that prioritises living life the green way. Helping people in minimising dairy-based products and increasing plant-based meals and munchies, brands are stepping up and introducing alternatives for people to live by.
Plant-based alternatives consist of alternate options to dairy milk, egg and meat. For instance:
- Plant-based meat impersonates meaty products such as sausages, chicken, prawns, salmon, scampi, tuna and others to provide a greener alternative including vital wheat gluten or seitan, soy and tofu, pea protein, potato starch, coconut oil, beans and lentils, nuts and seeds and vegetables.
- Furthermore, the dairy choices are substituted by almond milk, oat milk, rice milk, coconut milk and other alternatives.
Plant-based superfoods taking the lead
Superfoods are the food items that offer a maximal number of nutritional benefits and escalate the nutritive content in one’s diet.
Initially, dairy products might have caught people’s attention but with buckwheat, quinoa, millets and other green alternatives making their debut in the market, plant-based substitutes are now taking the lead in the superfood domain as well.
Talking facts and numbers
The current trends making it big in the country, it is only fair for plant-based alternatives to not only join the list but spearhead it instead. Here are a few stats to reflect how the plant-based trend is making its space while anticipating tremendous growth in the near future.
According to the data from Google AdWords also shows that vegan-related searches shot up by 47 per cent in 2020, indicating the interest of consumers shifting to plant-based diets.
As per a survey by Good Food Institute (GFI)
- Over 196 new unique investors made investments in the plant-based protein space in 2020, increasing the total unique investors active in the sector 44 percent from 2019
- The rising consumption demand for plant-based options is driving restaurants and retailers to offer more plant-based selections
- 80 percent of the customers who have tried plant-based meat plan to replace some or all animal-based meat with plant-based meat in the next year
- 56 percent of consumers appreciate the health benefits of switching to plant-based proteins and more than 70 percent of consumers view protein from plant sources as healthy, compared to about 35 percent who view animal protein as healthy
These facts and statistics amongst many others (that reflect how 1 in every 3 people in the UK consume plant-based milk and how plant-based foods in the U.S. are a $7 billion market) further indicate the skyrocketing success of plant-based alternatives across the oceans.
Plant-based diets to change the world?
As per a study, among animal-based foods, beef is the largest contributor to climate change. It generates 25% of total food emissions, followed by cow milk (8%) and pork (7%). This, in turn, results in more greenhouse emission and thus disrupting the green cover and proving to be an intervention in the process of creating a better today and a safer, healthier tomorrow.
United Nations leaders are also stepping forward and requesting people to consume less meat and go cruelty-free with plant-based alternatives. The peace-keeping, world-nurturing organisation recently commented on how making food production more climate-friendly is essential to reduce hunger in a warming world.
Discussing UN stepping up to indicate the need for change, here’s how the organisation called out the people across the nations –
The UN suggests eating less meat?!
Throwing light on the special report on climate change and land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN came forward as a responsible leader and recommended consuming less meat. It stated plant-based diets as a major opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change; further including a policy suggestion to combat the numbers with respect to meat consumption.
What next?
These measures, impact and stats together signify how plant-based diets are contributing their bit to battle against grave concerns of today while also helping us to integrate a source of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants in our diets with extensive health benefits.
Aiding to curb issues such as weight management, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease and the microbiome, plant-based alternatives have the potential of not only being a hard-hitting trend in 2022 but a permanent part of routines and lives for the days to come.
Plant-based alternatives are a sustainable ecological solution that is changing the world one day at a time, without compromising with the flavour palette of the food items.