The rapid rise of vegan meat in the UK and many other developed countries is often described as a "food revolution". As a disruptive food technology, vegan meat fuses food science and bold social change agendas: countering climate change, improving citizens' health, and avoiding animal cruelty. Since it mimics animal meat's textures and flavour, vegan meat facilitates non-vegan consumers' transition to a low-animal-meat diet, a critical goal for reaching net-zero target in our food systems. However, vegan meat's meteoric rise has been accompanied by hypes: inflated expectations, opportunistic entries, and ruthless competition, which in time may generate disappointments (when expectations are not met) and failures (when start-ups cannot scale up fast enough to compete). The present fragmented state of the vegan meat sector also suggests inconsistent communications, exactly at a time when the nascent market needs credible and compelling value propositions, which can convince more consumers to select vegan meat and to engage with the social change agendas represented by vegan meat. Our proposed research project aims to help address this problem by presenting an in-depth understanding of the sector's internal dynamics and external drivers and inhibitors. Since abundant studies have suggested that cultural-based connections with stakeholders are crucial to the success of moral markets (i.e., markets concerned with creating not only wealth but also social goods), we examine the roles of vegan meat entrepreneurs and other sector members in utilising cultural resources to navigate a hyped market, exploiting economic opportunities while expanding vegan meat's moral claims and entrepreneurs' value-based identities. Importantly, we want to understand how value-driven entrepreneurs, many of whom built their companies with a view of avoiding animal cruelty and/or environmental damage (i.e., two deeply rooted problems in our food systems), deploy narratives, stories, analogies, and metaphors to create value propositions and influence consumers, media/the public, investors, and policymakers. We explore the above dynamics across two markets: 1) UK: where the food policy is passive in addressing climate change and where significant research clusters have not yet formed; 2) the Netherlands: where the food policy proactively tackles climate change and where plant-based food science is booming, with ambitious goals of leading the world's food system transition. Our comparative approach will generate insights that can be applied in multiple ways: 1)Research papers will contribute to knowledge by presenting novel theories on how entrepreneurs use cultural strategies to navigate a hyped moral market that is rapidly mainstreaming. 2) By disseminating knowledge through our website and tailored events, we help vegan meat entrepreneurs to deeply understand the dynamics of their own sector (e.g., the motivations and strategies of other entrepreneurs and key stakeholders), stimulating collective learning, as well as creating motivations to network, associate, and participate in collective sector-building. 3)The comparative insights will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and stakeholders in the UK and Dutch markets to broaden their views and expand their strategic understanding of the sector; opportunities of cross-pollination of ideas and strategies, or even business alliances, may be possible. 4)By sharing our findings with food consultancies and media experts we dispel myths in the sector and provide credible, nuanced and in-depth understanding of entrepreneurs and stakeholders (strengths, challenges, motivations, strategies and long-term plans). This knowledge sharing will enable those food experts to more accurately report on a vitally important and rapidly expanding food sector.

Our vision is to maximise the food potential of UK pasture by using targeted chemical processing and novel biotechnology to convert grass into nutritious edible fractions for healthier and more affordable alternative foods, making UK agriculture more resilient and sustainable. Our proposal aims to use novel chemical processing methods to extract the central edible fractions from grass (protein, digestible carbohydrates, vitamins, lipids, fibre) before culturing the yeast Metschnikowia pulcherrima on the cellulosic fraction to produce mycoprotein and a lipid suitable as a palm oil substitute. These ingredients will then be combined in a range of alternative meat and dairy products, displacing environmentally damaging imported ingredients currently used. Further processing of the waste products from the process will produce nutrient rich fertilizers and help create a model for future circular farming economies. When optimised this process would only need 10 to 15kg of fresh grass (20% dry matter content) to produce 1kg of edible food ingredients, of which approximately 25% would be lipid and 35% protein. Whilst not entirely comparable on a nutritional basis this represents a ten-fold increase in productivity compared to cattle raised for meat, or twice the productivity of dairy cows. By converting grass into edible food components, a number of advantages are realised including: - UK produced substitutes for palm oil, soya protein, and other imported food ingredients. This has environmental benefits in the UK and abroad. It will provide UK produced healthy nutritional substitutes for ingredients grown on former rainforest sites, whilst significantly reducing food miles; - Produce UK food substitutes for over two billion pounds worth of annual food imports, with the opportunity to export significant quantities of surplus produce; - Improved UK resilience to climate change as grass is more resilient to flooding and other extreme weather conditions than most other crops; - As the process is feedstock agnostic, it should work equally well with wildflower rich pasture grass. This potentially enables the reintroduction of grasslands with greater biodiversity without having an impact on the grasses usability, an environmentally beneficial by-product of the process; - Providing a commercially viable non-livestock based market for forage production that would also allow arable land that is prone to flooding to profitably return to meadow grass production; - The profitable inclusion of grass in arable rotations to help combat blackgrass and other pesticide resistant weeds; - At present, in some areas it is uneconomic to build and maintain livestock fencing, resulting in grassland in these regions having little commercial agricultural value. These grasslands will now become commercially viable, and contribute to UK food production; - Limited risk in scaling up as there is no need to invest in new farm machinery, existing forage equipment and storage facilities will suffice and the bio-processing technology is mature and already used for many other industrial applications; - Opportunities for investment in a new UK food industry; - With the production of more digestible fractions, this project would produce more sustainable, UK sourced, feed for monogastric livestock; - Initial research suggests that sufficient unutilised grass is available for the P2P process, therefore, this system should have little or no impact on grass supplies for dairy and livestock farming.