Many plant-based products launch well – and then quietly disappear from baskets. In this opinion piece, Elyas Coutts, CEO at Connect Vending, examines the gap between trial and repeat purchase, and why the conditions that drive a strong launch are often entirely different from the ones that build lasting consumer habits.
Launch numbers in plant-based are flattering, but the data often looks great due to good distribution, a January health kick and promotional prices. Then, three months later, the repeat rates come in, and the picture is very different. Products often get delisted, or ranges get cut.
This cycle is familiar to anyone who's been in the category for more than a few years. The honest answer is that most plant-based products are designed to be tried, not to be bought again. Those are genuinely different briefs, and the industry hasn't fully reckoned with that yet.
Trial vs repeat purchase
A product launching well doesn't mean consumers want it – at least not in the way that matters commercially. Vegan and new listings with promotional support drive initial sales, but none of that is a reliable indicator of what consumers will do on a routine Wednesday shop when there's no nudge, no promotion, nothing pushing them toward it except their own genuine preference.
Brands make significant decisions regarding early sales such as production investment, distribution commitments and range extensions. When that velocity is novelty-driven rather than preference-driven, the drop-off that follows can look catastrophic. But often the product hasn't failed, it just was never built to earn a repeat purchase. That's a different problem entirely and an important distinction that often gets missed.
The format problem
Most plant-based product development happens around an idealised eating occasion. The home cook with time and interest, the considered weekend meal, the consumer who reads the packaging. However, this is no longer how consumers eat: often, they gravitate towards fast, low-effort products or snacks.
Workplace and convenience settings are the clearest example of this. High frequency, high volume, convenience is almost the entire decision, so a chilled plant-based product that needs a microwave and smells strong when heated is going to struggle in a shared office kitchen. Not because it's a bad product, but because it was built for a different occasion – and nobody asked whether it would work in this one.
The sensory gap that kills repeat purchase
Taste and texture are consistently cited as the main reasons people don't come back to plant-based products, but it's worth being specific about what that means in practice, because the gap is rarely as dramatic as that framing suggests. Most products aren't being rejected because they taste bad, plant-based flavour profiles have come a long way. The issue is much smaller than flavour: a slightly grainy texture in the mince product, a burger that holds together in the photograph but not quite so well in the actual bun, or an off-flavour that goes unnoticed on the first bite and starts to become more obvious by the third.
Individually, these are small things, but they accumulate in the consumer's memory and the benchmark they're measuring against, consciously or not, is always the conventional product. That comparison is running every single time someone eats. Over-promising in marketing makes this worse: if the brand's promise is that you won't notice the difference and the consumer notices the difference, that gap feels much bigger than it is. A sensory shortfall is one thing, but a broken brand promise is considerably harder to recover from.
The premium is sustainable, right up until it is not
Plant-based carries a price premium across most categories and that's not going to change quickly. Paying a premium once for something new feels like a considered choice, a bit of an experiment, but paying that same premium every single week starts to feel like an ongoing commitment that needs justification. When the taste isn't quite equal, the convenience is sometimes less and the price is higher, consumers do a quiet calculation. They often don't even realise they're doing it, and a lot of the time they solve it by returning to what they were buying before.
Premium positioning isn't the problem – failing to consistently earn it week after week is. The brands losing repeat purchase at the top end are usually those where the gap between price and experience has widened rather than closed over time and consumer tolerance for that isn't unlimited.
What live purchasing environments show
Looking at buying patterns, particularly in convenience retail and workplace channels, a consistent picture emerges. Products that hold repeat purchases are easy to use, consistent, available where people shop – rather than just where they were launched – and priced in a way that holds up to weekly scrutiny. They fit into how people already eat.
Products that plateau quickly were usually optimised for launch visibility. Which works as a short-term strategy, but visibility is not retention. They need different approaches from the start, and treating them as the same design problem is where a lot of the commercial damage happens.
It's also worth saying that the consumers driving strong launch numbers aren't always the ones who build the repeat purchase base. Vegan shoppers and category enthusiasts are valuable, but they move fast and try everything. They're not representative of the mainstream buyer whose weekly habits are where sustainable volume lives. Reading early sales as mainstream demand leads to decisions that don't hold up further down the line.
The repeat purchase
Getting someone to try a product is achievable. The right launch investment, good distribution, a compelling price point. Getting them to make it part of how consumers eat every week is a different challenge. Less exciting to talk about, but considerably more important.
Format decisions, channel strategy, pricing and product development – all of it needs to be built around habitual purchase from the start, not retrofitted after a disappointing three months. The question manufacturers need to think about isn't just whether people will try it, it's whether they'll still be buying it in six months – and in which channel, and in what format, that happens.
The brands building durable positions in plant-based aren't always the most innovative ones; they're the ones whose products fit most naturally into real eating behaviour.
