Nomad Foods’ Birds Eye brand in the United Kingdom has revamped its Green Cuisine Meat-Free Sausages menu to include an upgraded Cumberland-style offering. The frozen product has been formulated to dial up taste credentials and savory notes, and features a new casing that locks in juiciness and delivers a firmer bite. Distribution is in recyclable packaging.
Priced at £2.50, the vegan sausage was listed at Sainsbury’s stores on March 27. It will soon begin rolling out to wider grocery, convenience, wholesale and foodservice channels across the nation.
Shoppers are continuing to look for plant-based alternatives of their favorite foods, with alternative protein products forecast to carve out an 11% share of the overall protein market by 2035. Birds Eye’s Green Cuisine range has helped to fuel category growth, providing meat-free versions of some of the most popular dinner time staples in Britain.
According to Kantar Worldpanel data, 9.6% of the total UK population purchased Birds Eye Green Cuisine products for the 52-week period ending on January 23, 2022. Furthermore, Nielsen ScanTrack reports the line registered strong growth of +31.3% during 2021. This figure equates to tremendous growth of over 300% compared to 2019 sales volume.
“We are always looking for ways to enhance our offering to ensure we are delivering products that shoppers keep coming back to. That’s why we’ve invested in improving the quality and taste of one of our original Green Cuisine SKUs,” said Victoria Westwood, senior brand manager. “Cumberland-style sausages are the tastiest we’ve created to date. This isn’t just our opinion either; consumers agree, with testing revealing that the new recipe has much higher preference scores than the original version of the sausage.”
