Find Tesco vegan food ... in the meat aisle

VEGAN burgers, sausages and other plant-based foods are to be sold in chiller cabinets alongside the real thing by Tesco – which wants to encourage customers to eat less meat.

The move by Britain’s biggest supermarket confirms a huge shift in eating habits away from meat and dairy products.

It says it wants to play an active role in encouraging customers to eat less meat while enjoying more plant-based alternatives and more vegetables.

In part of a wider trend, Sainsbury’s has adopted similar tactics, as well as offering leaflets setting out benefits of eating greens and vegetarian recipes.

Tesco says its move is designed to make it easier for the growing number of socalled flexitarians to cut back on red meat, as well as for committed vegetarians and vegans.

The supermarket giant first began selling the meatless Beyond Burger, created in America, in its fresh meat chillers last year, but it is now expanding the policy to other brands, such as Heck, Vivaris, and Vegetarian Butcher. Selling this type of product alongside real meat has proved very successful in America.

Livestock farming has been associated with generating the greenhouse gas

‘Massive effect on how we shop’

blamed for global warming. Meanwhile, red meat has been associated by the World Health Organisation and others with cancer. A Tesco spokesman said: ‘From Monday, flexitarians, who eat both meat and plant-based alternatives, will be able to find both next to each other in a new fixture in the meat aisle at larger Tesco stores.’

The retailer pointed to research from analysts Kantar Worldpanel, which found that 21 per cent of UK households have reduced their meat intake in the past two years. Ten per cent of households include a flexitarian, 5 per cent a vegetarian and 1 per cent a vegan.

Significantly, more than nine in ten plant-based meals were eaten by nonvegans in the UK in 2018.

Director of Plant-Based Innovation at Tesco, Derek Sarno, said: ‘The rise of eating more plant-based food and people becoming flexitarian is having a massive effect on the way many people shop and ... the retail industry is having to adapt.’

The bid by Sainsbury’s to encourage a switch to a plant-based diet is part of a project supported by University of Oxford academics and funded as part of a £5million Wellcome Trust programme, Our Planet, our Health, which aims to improve health and combat climate change.