ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE9 March 2022

Consumer insights on Veganuary: the ‘steaks’ are high for UK brands

FMCG Features Trends

If you’ve turned your TV on or been grocery shopping, chances are you’ll have heard of Veganuary. With 35% of global conversations, the United Kingdom is clearly a market with huge potential for brands that want to ride the vegan train.

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Conversations were going full swing with over 50K results and 250K engagement in the space of a month. Now that’s a lot of data to extract consumer insights from! Brands battled for the audience’s attention with marketing campaigns each more creative than the other.

Fast food giant McDonald’s hit hard when it announced McPlant, its very first vegan burger. The new partnership with meat-free brand Beyond Meat collected 83K mentions, 421K engagement and over 2M views of the video across social media.

Using consumer insights to innovate

With 92% of plant-based meals being eaten by non-vegan, data around the growing meat-free food economy is full of consumer insights and commercial opportunities. January was a busy month for the FMCG industry and the big players competed for their share of the cake.

Aldi stole the spotlight with a full-line of vegan products, out of which their vegan cheese received the most mentions and a 63% positive sentiment. A move that turned out to be very fruitful for the supermarket chain as it saw a 500% spike in plant-based sales and a 250% year-on-year increase of its vegan range sales.

However, Aldi wasn’t alone in the race to win over the vegan consumer. Taking it very seriously, Sainsbury’s predicted in their Future of Food report that vegans and vegetarians are pegged to make up a quarter of the British population by 2025. They saw a 24% increase in customers searching for vegan products online and started investing in bio-fortification foods like their Super Mushrooms.

Other retailers have seen an opportunity for growth and broadened their offering for the occasion like Tesco. They celebrated a sales boom with the introduction of a new plant-based meal deal with Wicked Kitchen, making vegan food affordable to millions of consumers and generating 270K engagement.

Grocers weren’t the only brands that innovated in the plant-based space. Veganuary was the perfect excuse for many businesses to launch their own vegan products. Amongst the most anticipated were Domino’s, with a vegan range of its best-selling pizzas ( 267.3K engagement), and Philadelphia’s oat-based spread, collecting a humble 6K mentions. The list goes on and consumers now have more options to meet their needs than ever before.

Getting closer to consumers

Answering people’s desire for more varied plant-based food options by launching new products and expanding ranges is great to make vegan-friendly consumers happy. But it’s not the only benefit. By taking part in the movement, brands can address societal issues that are dear to their customers, such as sustainability, health concerns, animal cruelty…

Moved by the desire to build stronger ties with their customers, 75 global brands joined the movement with bright and shiny PR campaigns that resulted in positive uplift in net sentiment. Harrods’ Veganuary content enjoyed a positive sentiment of 36% and Superdrug did even better with 50.8% (with respectively 58.8 and 44.5% neutral sentiment).

Aldi stole the spotlight with a full-line of vegan products, out of which their vegan cheese received the most mentions and a 63% positive sentiment. A move that turned out to be very fruitful for the supermarket chain as it saw a 500% spike in plant-based sales and a 250% year-on-year increase of its vegan range sales.

However, Aldi wasn’t alone in the race to win over the vegan consumer. Taking it very seriously, Sainsbury’s predicted in their Future of Food report that vegans and vegetarians are pegged to make up a quarter of the British population by 2025. They saw a 24% increase in customers searching for vegan products online and started investing in bio-fortification foods like their Super Mushrooms.

Other retailers have seen an opportunity for growth and broadened their offering for the occasion like Tesco. They celebrated a sales boom with the introduction of a new plant-based meal deal with Wicked Kitchen, making vegan food affordable to millions of consumers and generating 270K engagement.

Grocers weren’t the only brands that innovated in the plant-based space. Veganuary was the perfect excuse for many businesses to launch their own vegan products. Amongst the most anticipated were Domino’s, with a vegan range of its best-selling pizzas ( 267.3K engagement), and Philadelphia’s oat-based spread, collecting a humble 6K mentions. The list goes on and consumers now have more options to meet their needs than ever before.

Consumer insights is the new gold

In today’s digital age, brands have tons of data but what they really need is real-time consumer insights. It’s becoming more crucial than ever for brands to be consumer-centric. Consumers are the real decision-makers. Brands can monitor and analyse real-time conversations online to optimise their campaigns and use not only Veganuary as an efficient marketing tool, but also turn any data into consumer insights to achieve consumer closeness.

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