Yves Veggie Cuisine products being discontinued after more than 40 years

The once-popular plant-based food brand, Yves Veggie Cuisine, has announced it is being discontinued.

The brand was founded in Vancouver more than 40 years ago.

“I think this is a function of a couple of things,” Michael von Massow, a professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph, told Global News.

“The first is, while there was great optimism of the growth of the plant-based segment, the growth has stagnated a little bit and we’ve not seen the same double-digit growth that we saw a few years ago.”

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Von Massow said there are also a lot of new options in the marketplace, so shares of Yves must have gone down.

“While there are people who love their products, they’ve seen shares go down and the parent company have said anything that’s small, we’re not making money on it and we’re starting to rationalize some of these lines,” he added.

Von Massow said that there will be opportunities for other companies to take on the products, but the key to success is in bringing new products to market that meet the needs and desires of consumers.

“I think there is still demand for meat alternatives,” he added.

“The hype we saw three, four, five years ago has reduced. I expect there will still be growth and I expect companies like Better Beef, Beyond Meat and those sorts of companies to continue to innovate.

“I think what happened was they launched many of these products to significant hype. And for many people, they didn’t deliver what they were looking for.”