Frost Radar™: Protein Ingredients, 2022

Frost Radar™: Protein Ingredients, 2022

Consumers are increasingly adopting flexitarian (meatless diet but occasionally includes meat or fish), vegetarian (meatless diet), or vegan (zero animal product diet) lifestyles due to concerns about health risks, animal welfare (factory farming), and environmental sustainability. This global trend is augmenting demand for alternative or plant-based sources of protein.

Industry convergence is reshaping the global protein ingredients industry by helping companies broaden their product portfolios to stay ahead of the competition. Dairy protein ingredients manufacturers are adding plant protein ingredients to their offerings by establishing partnerships with plant protein ingredients companies. In response to the significant prospects for alternative protein, some plant protein ingredients manufacturers are collaborating with product formulators or forward integrating to add alternative proteins to their portfolios.

Successful companies in this space have diversified product offerings, significant R&D investment, strong focus on developing innovative (novel/functional) protein ingredients, a clearly defined customer alignment system (execute customer satisfaction surveys, integrate customer feedback into R&D and sales strategies, and offer formulation expertise to customers), a solid growth pipeline, and strong sales and marketing strategies (such as participate in events, tradeshows, webinars, and webcasts to strengthen brand and drive demand generation).

The global protein ingredients market will total about $28.4 billion in 2022 and is on course to reach $52.2 billion by 2030. The market is on a growth trajectory, driven mainly by the fast-growing plant protein ingredients segment, which consumers prefer for reasons related to nutritional profile, lactose intolerance concerns, and sustainability commitments.

In a highly fragmented market with more than 200 global industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted the top 20 companies in this Frost Radar™ analysis. The 30 major market participants in terms of revenue were invited to participate in this analysis. Some vendors either chose not to participate, could not complete the questionnaire in a timely fashion, or would not provide any data to substantiate growth or revenue.

The Frost Radar reveals the market positioning of companies in an industry using their Growth and Innovation scores as highlighted in the Frost Radar methodology. The document presents competitive profiles of each company based on its strengths, opportunities, and a small discussion on its positioning. Frost & Sullivan analyzes hundreds of companies in the industry and benchmarks them across the 10 criteria, where the leading companies are then positioned on the Radar. Industry leaders on both the Growth and Innovation indices are recognized as best practice recipients.