Back in 2018, a wave of Indian brands bet big on mock meat.

GoodDot launched its vegan mutton. Then Blue Tribe followed, bringing on Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli as investors and ambassadors. Even mainstream companies like ITC, Tata and Licious jumped on this bandwagon.

This was supposed to be the plant-based meat revolution. But, years later, it seems that this revolution has stayed on the supermarket shelf.

So, what went wrong?

And now, with brands rebranding shifting from “fake meat” to “plant protein,” can this segment make a comeback?

To hear from consumers and industry insiders on this, check out the latest episode of The Signal Brief.

The Core produces The Signal Brief. Follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

NOTE: A machine transcribed this episode. A human has looked at this text but there might still be errors. Please refer to the audio above, if you need to clarify something. If you want to give us feedback, please write to us at feedback@thecore.in.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kudrat (Host): Kuntal is a Mumbai-based software engineer turned vegan mountaineer. He has tried it all—from vegan shrimp to vegan chicken.

He has come a long way from the first time he bit into a vegan burger in the US back in 2002.

Kuntal:   So I remember walking into a vegan restaurant. This was a 100% vegan cafe. It was called Native Foods. It was one of the OGs of the vegan movement in the US. And I went into the restaurant and I ordered a burger.

I was served a burger which had a fake meat patty in it, and for a moment I was so grossed out that I went into a vegan restaurant and I was served a meat patty. I actually discarded that whole burger. When I went home, I actually wrote a terrible review for Native Food saying that they are selling meat.

They got back to me. The owner of the cafe got back to me saying, look, I understand you are a passionate vegan and everything, but this product that you ate is 100% vegan. The whole patty is made from plants. It's just the look and the feel and the mouth feel, and all of those things are designed to mimic meat, but it is a 100% vegan product.

Kudrat (Host): Back on Indian soil, the story unfolded differently for another consumer.

Anish Mittal, a 29-year-old working at a non-profit in Delhi, spotted mock meat flooding shelves and social media last year. He gave the product a shot.

Anish Mittal: I always thought maybe I'll find out what the non-vegetarians are having without having to have meat.

I'm forgetting its name. It starts with H. I kebabs, I tried sea kebabs. I tried some other Kima. A little underwhelming.

Little stiff, dry. Not really, not really great.

Kudrat (Host): After that brief, disappointing foray, Anish found himself wondering something deeper:

Why do meat-eaters even like this stuff?

He is, after all, one of the roughly 30% of Indians who have never eaten meat in their entire lives. A significant group that should, in theory, have welcomed these new plant-based alternatives with open arms.

And yet, even as brands like Blue Tribe and Imagine Meats arrived with sleek packaging and bold promises of “meat without the guilt,” something didn’t quite land.

Kudrat (Host): My name is Kudrat Wadhwa and you’re listening to The Signal Brief. We don’t do hot takes. Instead we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends.

Today’s episode: Mock Meat in India. Why did a category that arrived with so much hope and investment fall so strangely flat?

And more importantly—can it still make a comeback?

Jinal Soni:  So technically the plant-based meat has been around. Mock meat has been around in India since ages because we always had soya chunks, which were always available.

Kudrat (Host): That was Jinal Shah, or ‘The Vegan Marketer’. She’s a plant-based marketing expert who watches this space closely.

Jinal Soni: We had brands like Nutrella. We had Fortune. Soya chunks and all these brands have been around for a while. It used to be called soya chunks were called the poor man's chicken because somebody who can't afford chicken, they would then eat soya.

But if we talk about mock meat as per the current definition, then that I think started doing well in India around say 2017, 2019, because in 2019 globally it took off where you had companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Meat. Beyond Meat particularly got listed on the NASDAQ in the US and that attracted everybody's attention. And there was a lot of positive sentiment towards the plant-based sector as a whole and plant-based meats particularly, and because there was so a lot of celebrities got into it either as investors or as co-founders or even just as consumers.

Kudrat (Host): GoodDot launched vegan mutton from Udaipur around 2018. Blue Tribe followed in 2020, later bringing in Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli as investors and ambassadors.

Imagine Meats arrived in 2021 with Riteish and Genelia Deshmukh promising “meat without the guilt.” Even big meat players like Licious jumped in with UnCrave. ITC and Tata tested the waters too.

The excitement was palpable. Supermarket shelves glowed with shiny new packs. Influencers posted sizzling reels. Investors poured in.

Clip: Plant Based Chicken Nuggets ad by Blue Tribe

Kudrat (Host): For a brief moment, it felt like the plant-based meat revolution had finally reached Indian kitchens.

But the hype didn’t translate into success.

By 2025, India’s plant-based meat market was still about 120 million dollars, according to IMARC estimates—tiny for a country of this scale.

A 2024 report by the Good Food Institute shows that awareness of plant-based meat hovered at just 27-30% among urban consumers. And of those who knew about it, only about 11% had actually tried the products. Even among those who had tried, many didn’t return.

The revolution, it turned out, barely left the supermarket shelf.

Those inside the industry point to several clear reasons why mock meat stalled in India. I spoke to Vijay Makwana, who led Blue Tribe as its CEO from 2023 to 2025.

Vijay Makwana: So we did find that a lot of vegetarian consumers got fairly turned off by the name meat itself anywhere on the pack. And we found this in study after study that the connotations of the name or the word kind of was fairly deeply ingrained.

And what you call something is very important, as all consumer goods marketers know.

Kudrat (Host): Kuntal, the vegan mountaineer we heard at the top of the episode, agrees.

Surrounded by his vegetarian Gujarati family and friends, he has seen this visceral reaction up close.

Kuntal: I'm mostly surrounded by vegetarians. That's pretty much my family, my extended family, most of my friends. And to them, they simply do not want to eat meat or simply they do not like meat. So the question of eating fake meat for them is like, why would I eat fake meat if I don't want to eat real meat.

To them eating fake meat is almost same as eating real meat. They tell me that as a vegan, how can you eat fake meat.

Kudrat (Host): It makes perfect sense.

In the West, many turn vegetarian for health or environmental reasons. But in India, most vegetarians didn’t grow up eating meat at all. A mock-meat message that promises “meat without the guilt” actually turned them off.

Moreover, companies adopted a “save the environment” message in their advertising too—that’s a position that again, while successful in the West, carried far less weight in India.

Vijay Makwana: The other interesting thing we found out is nobody cared that much about the environment. It's not that, or let's say the environment as a positioning, environmental consciousness as a positioning was not as productive for us. That's not to say Indians didn't care about the environment, it is to say that it wasn't that they were consuming a lot of meat which they would give up so that they would be environmentally conscious now in their eating habits, which was the position the Western companies adopted, because they were already over consuming beef and such stuff.

So it didn't dovetail well with Indian consumers, this Western positioning.

Kudrat (Host): Jinal Shah, the vegan marketer, says cost was a bar too, as was the form of these products.

Jinal Shah: So, for example, you have plant-based sausage, or you have chicken nuggets, or you have burger patties now. The same concept these players did not truly Indianise or customise them for India.

And we had a plethora of players coming in with burger patties, with sausages, ham, things like that. Now, those are not foods that Indians eat regularly.

And pricing was also a concern initially for most of these players because they were restricting themselves to a specific format. And they were trying very, very hard to do justice to that product. Like they wanted it to look exactly like the animal-based product. So some ingredients were added, some processing was added to get that exact visual.

To make the product imitate animal-based product visually also, and in terms of mouth feel, texture, smell, et cetera, that to an extent added unnecessary cost to the overall product.

Kudrat (Host): Early mock meat products cost Rs 400 to Rs 600 for a small pack.

Regular chicken? Roughly half that.

Companies were asking consumers to pay significantly more, for something consumers weren’t even sure they needed.

But Vijay believes the story is far from finished.

Vijay Makwana: The specifics of the food business and of plant-based meat in particular is it is a fairly new, it is very, very new. It's a new technology.

So we are too early in the cycle. In any case, we can say that the first cycle has happened right now even in the West, where it was a much more pronounced phenomenon earlier. In India, from 2019 to now, it's just been six, seven years. I would say that the first cycle of discovery has happened.

Yes, there have been some surprises and there have been some insights that businesses have discovered about this particular area or category. So I would neither write it off nor say that it's not crypto where it comes on board and suddenly everyone in the world took on board.

Those kind of upticks happen very, very rarely even in technologies. It takes a fair bit of time.

Kudrat (Host): Vijay sees fresh optimism—especially now that companies are quietly changing their message.

The old pitch of “plant-based meat that saves the planet” is fading. The new buzzword dominating packs and websites is: PROTEIN.

I spoke to Varun, co-founder of Prot—a shelf-stable pea protein product, think of it like vegan paneer. His earlier venture was plant-based seafood.

Varun: So that's where we realized that the larger problem to solve for India will be the protein deficiency gap.

And as soon as we realized that opportunity, I won't say we pivoted, but it was more of an expansion to the previous stories.

And building it from that standpoint, that's where we rebranded and we initiated our efforts. At some point in 2024, we left the alternative seafood story for its market and evolved to a rising protein deficiency story, building towards it from India.

Kudrat (Host): Blue Tribe has rebranded too. Go to their site and the first thing you see is “Plant Protein Goodness” in huge, bold letters.

Their standout product now? 100% maida-free soya chaap.

Brands are finally leaning into real Indian cravings—spiced keema, chaap, not just Western burgers and sausages.

Now, you could call this clever rebranding. But Varun pushed back.

Kudrat (from clip): Could it be said that what you are doing is a rebranding of mock meat, basically. You're not saying mock meat, but you're saying that this is plant-based protein.

Varun (from clip): So exactly that's definitely true in its nature. Obviously we have worked upon the product so that whenever someone is trying a product, they don't instantly relate it to a right. That has been a combination of the product itself as well as the ing.

I won't say it's a simple ing change because anyone who's trying a product, the product has to speak for itself. So we have definitely done a rebrand to change the polishing of the product. At the same time, the product itself has been worked upon to give a new texture to life.

Kudrat (Host): For people like Kuntal, the journey has already come full circle. The same “fake” burger he once tossed in disgust at Native Foods is now something that he actively seeks out.

Kuntal: Like in the last 20 plus years or so, I have tried everything wherever I've gone, maybe in the US and multiple states in the US or even UK and London, or anywhere wherever I've traveled, Tanzania and a whole host of places. Wherever I travel, wherever I find any mock meat options which are vegan, every time mock meat is vegan, I have absolutely most definitely tried it.

And of course I love the taste of it.

Kudrat (Host): For millions of other Indians—vegetarian families, busy urban professionals, even occasional meat-eaters—the question now is not: “Does it taste exactly like meat?”

But rather, “Does it give me the protein, texture, and convenience I actually need?”

The first cycle delivered tough lessons. The next one could bring something quieter but more powerful: real, practical adoption.

If—and only if—brands keep listening to Indian palates instead of importing Western dreams.

Kudrat (Host): That's all for today. You just heard The Signal Brief. We don't do hot takes. Instead, we bring you deep dives into the how and why of consumer trends. The Core produces The Signal Brief. Follow us wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

To check out the rest of our work, go to www.thecore.in.

If you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at feedback@thecore.in or you can write to me personally at kudrat@thecore.in.

Thank you for listening.