Feeding the flexitarians/
Peas of Heaven’s Swedish plant-based revolution

Peas of Heaven is a great name! How did the company get started?

Latif: It’s a really funny story. Marcus (the other co-founder) and Lucas are fourth-generation sausage and charcuterie makers! The business is the main high-quality, family organization in the western region of Sweden. Marcus was going to study to be a doctor but, at the age of twenty, he took over the family business from his father. At that point, their turnover was about 1 million euros and their father was wanting to pass it on to the next generation.

Marcus is really an entrepreneur; impossible means nothing to him. After he took over the meat company, it developed from a small, regional business into something that now has a turnover of maybe 15 million euros. But he’s also quite curious. About four years ago, he was reading about what’s happening in the industry, and he realized quite fast that if we want to keep eating sausages and all the other stuff we’ve been brought up on, something has to change in some way.

Marcus and Lucas both travelled around — to the US and to China — to find out how to do plant-based meat, because it was very new back then.

What was it like starting the business and learning how to make a new product?

Lucas: In Sweden, we were pretty early. It was really just raw material for vegans, like tofu and just raw peas: no meat. So we ordered from different countries around the world, and we started mixing and trying. Marcus tried everything at home! I was still working down in the production area at that point. I don’t know how many tries it took, but finally, we came up with the burger. That was the start of the journey, I think. Marcus is still responsible for our family business, but sooner or later that will change so we can focus 100% on Peas of Heaven.

But I think that really there were many things that started it all. It was the environment, but it was also friends. 

How did plant-based meats fit in with the culture around you at the time?

Latif: I think when I joined, I was the oldest one, and I’m thirty now. All of the guys and girls working at Peas of Heaven are our customer base. I remember Marcus telling me that he was at a party in 2018 or something, and he was getting quite warm in his clothes as CEO of the family business. Somebody came up to him and said “Oh, you’re working with killing animals, how can you do that?” But at the same time, for at least the foreseeable future, we still love the culture of meat: the barbecuing and the ease of it. It’s not having to go through the rush … traditional food such as sausages is still very convenient in people’s lives. 

Peas of Heaven started as a brand within the meat company in 2019 and, although we’ve separated the two companies now, I think that’s been quite unique. Our main customers are not vegan, they’re flexitarian. For all of our customers, there’s been belief in us: we’ve done food for one hundred years. This is a new type of food, but we’re credible and already have that trust.

 
Other than that unique starting position, what else has really influenced you from the beginning?

Lucas: I think that another thing that makes us unique is that we are young as a company. We’re not just older guys with a lot of money who want to make more money; we want to make an impact for real. It’s really important for us. We really are living for our company, and we need to think about our children and ourselves as well.
 
Beyond that, all the knowledge. We have the knowledge of the employees, but we also have our father’s knowledge, and that has been very important to us. 

Now that the company is independent, what are your plans for building it further?

Latif: We still share some of the resources with the mother company, but we’re really focussing on Peas of Heaven and scaling outside the Nordics. We want to become the enabler in the transition of the alternate protein market. 

I’m pretty convinced that the future will be better meat. There is sustainable meat, there is a place for a cow grazing; there’s also a healthy aspect for the environment to keep having cows grazing. But I know for myself, I’ll eat less meat, but I’ll eat better meat. It used to be called a Sunday roast for a reason. Not everyday roast three times a day; it used to be a luxury. 

When I have one of our plant-based hot dogs at a 7-Eleven here in Sweden, it tastes the same as, or even better than, the meat hot dog. It tastes more nutritious. It’s about 10 times better for the environment, and it costs the same. It’s those times that I think we’ll be able to help people make a convenient switch to plant-based.

In terms of pricing, are you aiming for it to be mass-marketable and available to everyone?

Latif: I think that Beyond Meat is a great try, but it’s not a buy. You can try it once, but you can’t buy it as a habit because it costs the same as a filet mignon. But if you think about the process of  producing our burger: you grow a pea, you extract what you need from the pea, you add water, rapeseed oil, and spice. It’s a much less resource-intensive process than making a burger from beef. There is no possibility of meat becoming cheaper to produce; it should probably go the other way. So I think that meat will become more expensive, we’ll eat it less, and the plant-based proteins will be able to compete on price, taste, and nutrition. 

Whatever we say as consumers, price is a really strong driver for a mass market. And if it’s not mass market, we won’t change anything. So for us, it’s not an option not to go that way. Since we launched in 2019, we’ve made seven formula improvements, and we’ve also reduced our price by over 60% to our biggest customers. Some of our products are coming on par to be meat alternatives in terms of cost. 

The other issue is that it needs to be distributed well to the consumer. In Sweden now, the vegan fridge is full of nutrition, allergy, weird milk, lactose-free stuff. If you were a mainstream consumer, you would never go there. So we did a test where we put our mince next to regular beef mince, and we saw an increase from selling 4-6 packages per week in that store to selling 100 in three days without any advertising or anything.

We’re just in the super early beginning, but as the enablers of this industry, it’s up to us to produce a competitive product that will really tip the market. 

How did you choose peas as your base ingredient specifically?

Latif: We were thinking mass market from the start, so we’ve been trying to avoid anything with allergens: no wheat or gluten. We also don’t have any soy. If you want to make a clean product, you need to start with the best ingredients possible for the end product. And from our point of view, it’s really good if an ingredient doesn’t have a lot of flavor of its own, because if it does, then you have to put something else in to balance that. You can start having to add in a lot. Peas are really good from an environmental perspective, for the products we’re trying to produce and for positioning them to be accessible to everyone. 

We’ve been trying to drive a Swedish pea protein project, because we have a lot of yellow peas in Sweden but we don’t have the processes to refine them. We’re working on that now. The food industry today is the worst-polluting industry in the whole word, in carbon dioxide or destruction of biodiversity or whatever measurements you want to take. But it also has the biggest potential for change because it’s such a big industry. Our goal is to have a climate-positive end product. Not only sustainable: sustainable would be good if we were in a sustainable place, but we’re not. Less bad is not a great option for us; it has to be good. So we need to start at the beginning. How are the crops grown? How is it transported, refined? We’re having a close dialogue with different ingredient suppliers that we can enable in our value chain and then help them transition.

But in terms of peas, we started with peas, but we’re already also doing sunflower now, and I think that we’ll have a range of different plant-based proteins for the best nutritional profiles. The variety is also essential, because if the food industry said “Well, we’ll just build as big a pea industry as we have with the meat industry and monocrop peas with a new set of factory farms”, then I don’t think we would be solving the problem really.

Have you seen a big increase in the number of people who want to change to a more sustainable, plant-based lifestyle?

Lucas: The younger generation in Sweden is really changing. Younger than me and my generation even. There are government policies in schools to increase vegetarian food; some schools have a goal to achieve 50% vegan food, but it’s already an option in schools all over Sweden.

So it’s an institutional transition as well as a personal one?

Latif: Sweden is probably one of the leading European markets in the transition. Over 50% of the people in Sweden identify as flexitarian. From what we can see, flexitarians are driven by climate first and health second to eat more plant-based products. The community is generally bigger among women, and it increases in size with lower age groups.

I think that the will is there. And in terms of schools, we are so eager to position ourselves because school chefs need easy transitions. At the moment, a lot of them are doing pancakes. But with our products, they could cook the same stroganoff or meatballs or stew: no learning new recipes or doing it differently. It can be friction-free.

In general though, the trend is high in Sweden, for sure. For our business, the only way we can make the transition quick enough is if we can do it ourselves. If we can control what energy is used for 95% of the process here, then we can make the change fast. I think that’s the key solution for why Peas of Heaven tastes so good and why we can innovate fast and use new ingredients fast: we have our own factory, our own R&D team. A lot of brands have co-packing or co-manufacturing, but we don’t believe that’s enough if you want to keep the speed up.

Just imagine if every sausage was a climate-positive sausage, it would be the easiest way to save the world!