IN Brief:
- Plant-based products account for 13% of NPD activity tracked by Point74, up from 11% in 2025.
- Two-thirds of Point74’s manufacturer customers have developed at least one vegan product during 2026.
- The figures highlight specification, allergen, labelling, and formulation management as practical constraints on plant-based development.
Point74 has reported an increase in plant-based new product development across its food manufacturing customer base, with vegan products accounting for 13% of the activity tracked through its software during 2026.
The figure is up from 11% in 2025. Point74 says two-thirds of its customers have developed at least one vegan product this year, suggesting manufacturers continue to allocate development resources to the category after a period in which parts of the plant-based market appeared to lose momentum.
Four clients have designated more than a fifth of their development pipeline as suitable for vegans, while customers with larger established vegan portfolios increased plant-based development by an average of 5% compared with the previous year.
Point74 provides new product development and product lifecycle management software to food and drink manufacturers. Its customer base spans categories including meat, snacking, bakery, and prepared foods, while the company says its systems manage more than 50,000 ingredient specifications and support more than 4,000 product launches each year.
That gives the dataset a useful view of work moving through manufacturer technical and NPD teams, but it is not a representative measure of the entire UK food industry. The figures describe Point74’s own customer base and should not be treated as market share data or proof that every part of the plant-based category is growing.
The distinction matters because a development pipeline records what manufacturers are working on, not what consumers will ultimately buy. Projects can be reformulated, delayed, cancelled, or absorbed into wider range changes before reaching commercial production, and a higher share of development activity does not guarantee stronger retail sales.
It is still a useful leading indicator. Manufacturers allocate technical staff, trial capacity, specification work, ingredient sourcing, packaging development, nutritional analysis, and factory time long before a product appears on shelf. An increase in that workload shows that plant-based concepts continue to compete for real production resources.
The practical difficulty is that replacing animal-derived ingredients is rarely a simple one-for-one substitution. Protein systems affect texture, water binding, emulsification, colour, flavour, nutrition, and process behaviour. Changes to fats, binders, stabilisers, or flavour systems can alter performance during mixing, forming, cooking, chilling, freezing, or reheating.
Each formulation change also propagates through the technical file. Manufacturers may have to update specifications, allergen assessments, nutritional calculations, supplier approvals, packaging declarations, claims, and process controls, while ensuring that a product marketed as vegan is manufactured under procedures compatible with that positioning.
Those requirements become more complicated when vegan and non-vegan products share equipment. Scheduling and cleaning procedures may need to control dairy, egg, or other animal-derived ingredients used elsewhere on the line, while packaging and label management must prevent obsolete declarations from remaining in use after a recipe change.
Point74’s figures therefore reveal an operational issue as much as a consumer trend. Rob Sinclair, chief executive at Point74, said ingredient substitutions, compliance, labelling, and allergens all make vegan development more complex, arguing that manufacturers with stronger systems can manage those changes without slowing the development process.
Digital product lifecycle tools are intended to reduce that administrative friction by connecting ingredient data, recipes, claims, nutritional information, regulatory fields, supplier records, and packaging information within one controlled environment. The benefit becomes more obvious as a product goes through repeated formulation changes.
A plant-based recipe may test several proteins, flavour systems, or stabilisers before reaching a final specification, with each version changing cost, nutrition, allergen status, process behaviour, and declarations. If those dependencies are maintained manually across separate spreadsheets and documents, every iteration creates another opportunity for data to diverge.
The latest Point74 figures also suggest that the category is becoming more selective. The rapid expansion of plant-based ranges earlier in the decade was followed by rationalisation as some products failed to secure sufficient repeat purchase. Manufacturers now have stronger incentives to ensure new concepts survive cost modelling, factory trials, shelf-life work, sensory assessment, and retailer scrutiny before launch.
That may favour fewer but more technically developed products. A formulation that works in a development kitchen but creates excessive cleaning time, unstable texture, poor yields, or expensive ingredient requirements will struggle once exposed to normal factory economics.
The 13% figure should therefore be read as evidence of renewed development activity rather than proof of a broad market recovery. Point74’s customers are putting more plant-based projects into their pipelines, but those projects still have to pass the operational and commercial tests that determine whether they become durable ranges.
The significance for manufacturers lies in where that pressure now sits. Plant-based development is no longer only a question of finding alternative proteins or flavours; it increasingly depends on how efficiently technical teams can manage specifications, claims, allergens, supplier data, and manufacturing constraints while recipes continue to change.
Point74’s dataset indicates that more projects are entering that process again. The next measure will be how many survive it and reach production with enough consistency, margin, and consumer demand to remain there.
