Nils-Gerrit Wunsch
Research expert covering foods trends in North America, Europe, and the global food system
Plant-based dairy and egg alternatives in the United States - statistics and facts
The size of the overall plant-based food market in the United States is over eight billion U.S. dollars. The lion’s share of the market is made up of different substitutes and alternatives for dairy products. Plant-based milk is the leading category by sales, but far from being the only dairy alternative. Cheese, butter, yogurt, creamers, and more each generate hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars on their own. Plant-based eggs, on the other hand, are just a tiny category of barely 43 million U.S. dollars.
Champion of growth
While the overall market has struggled both in terms of sales values and volumes, growth can still be seen in some smaller categories. Especially plant-based meat struggles with declining sales numbers. In the dairy department, plant-based creamers have grown by ten percent in sales value and were the leading growth category in 2023. Butter, yogurt, eggs, ice cream, and cheese were not spared a decline in sales. For a secondary dairy category, plant-based creamer sales have reached an impressive market value of about 700 million U.S. dollars.What Americans love
Americans have an appetite for cheese. The annual consumption of cheese in the U.S. exceeds 2.2 million metric tons. Its plant-based counterpart only comes to 9.61 million kilograms. Despite being much smaller, the plant-based cheese market offers a large variety of plant-based cheese types. Over half of the market is made up of cheese types that have a market share of five percent or less. The biggest chunk of the cheese wheel is made up of plant-based cream cheese. It accounts for a bit less than a quarter of the plant-based cheese market. Cheddar and mozzarella are the next most prominent substitutes. Under the pressure from rising food prices and criticism of ultra-processed foods the challenges to plant-based producers are significant. The central questions for the troubled plant-based market and its dairy segment are: will current trends hold? Or can consumers again be won over?
