A little flexibility isn’t a bad thing. With all of the food options available today, it turns out consumers don’t want to have to choose between only eating meat or a plant-based diet. Blended meat options — real meat combined with vegetables or plant-based proteins — offer a compromise.

Formulating meat and poultry products with naturally sourced ingredients is crucial to ensuring widespread consumer appeal. 

This year has seen a tremendous resurgence of breakfast meats due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with improved quality, convenient formulations and consumers’ demands for high protein at breakfast.

Candace Cage, brand manager for Gone Rogue snacks, discusses the new flavors, the early successes and the type of consumers of Land O’Frost’s unique protein snack brand.

As much as we may hope for traditional gatherings over the holidays, this year’s celebrations will certainly look different because of COVID-19. But younger consumers were already driving changes to holiday celebrations. 

It is the perfect storm for the lunchtime consumption of meat and poultry.

Barbecue is growing moderately in restaurants, with overall barbecue menu items growing 11 percent from the fourth quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Chicago-based Mintel International’s Menu Insights (MMI).

The snacking sector is increasingly rich with opportunity for meat and poultry merchandisers.