Top 10 Plant-Based Food Marketing Moves of 2022

Standout campaigns featured heavy metal, mind control, flying chickens and Kardashian siblings

American consumers may have lost some of their appetite for faux meat, but they’re still snapping up non-dairy ice cream, veggie-centric snacks, grain-based milks and egg substitutes at grocery stores, restaurants and fast food chains.

As the $7.4 billion U.S. industry has continued to grow, it has seen an explosion of products, meaning that distinctive, clutter-busting, strategic marketing is more important than ever.

Brands in the space have obliged this year, using everything from traditional 30-second spots to music festival activations, podcast parodies and eye-catching stunts to appeal to potential buyers. They didn’t shy away from serious issues like climate change and sustainability, yet they leaned into humor—sometimes with a dose of deception and melodrama—to show off their unique brand personalities. Their unconventional approaches took them from the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week to the center of power in Washington D.C. to the skies over Vancouver.

Bowery Farming
Agency: Colossus

To introduce this tech-enabled vertical farming startup, Colossus creatives could’ve explained the environmentally-friendly growing process or taken a food-porn approach with beauty shots of appetizing veggies.

Instead, they went for the funny bone. And they connected.

The work contrasts life’s small, and not so small, pitfalls and letdowns—your mother calls your sister “the pretty one,” nobody trusts you to hold their baby, you accidentally hit reply all—with the upside of eating pesticide-free, non-GMO, sustainably grown products.

The leafy greens and herbs may not be able to solve your problems, but they’re a better choice than some you’ve made lately, according to the cheeky ads under the “Feel Good Greens” tagline. And though this brand is more straight-up plant than plant-based, its advertising deserves a place among the cream of the crop.