Research
University of Sussex Studies
Working closely in partnership with the University of Sussex and Prof. Andrew Godley, we take learning from how successful brands and industries have been formulated. Andrew's most recent work includes a publication on Green Entrepreneurship and the emergence of the alternative meat sector, taking us back to 1965 and how Marlow Foods mycoprotein innovation broke into the market and spearheaded what is today's alt-protein sector.
Green entrepreneurship in UK foods and the emergence of the alternative meat sector: Quorn 1965–2006
The pioneer in alternative proteins was the British company Marlow Foods, which created the world’s first mycoprotein product under the Quorn brand name. This article explores its emergence and development between 1965 and 2006. This case study supports three of the broad premises in the existing literature on business history of green entrepreneurship; that green innovation typically takes longer than non-green, is therefore more costly, and that green entrepreneurs are typically values- not profit-driven. The article then explores these premises and their consequences in the case of Quorn. With the long period between its inception and market acceptance in the 1990s, there was a significant continuity gap in Quorn’s environmental credentials. Quorn bridged that gap because of a sustained commitment to environmentalism that came via the legacy of its very influential founder. But it was the BSE crisis that permitted the product to move from vegetarian niche to the mainstream
What can be learnt from how the modern poultry market was developed.
This chapter describes how the modern poultry industry emerged in Britain principally through initiatives from food retailers. It is this that distinguishes the British case from parallel developments in the United States, where there was also a great expansion in poultry production and consumption. As in the United States, entrepreneurial poultry farmers collaborated with pharmaceutical and animal-feeds companies and with food retailers and refrigeration-unit manufacturers, and together they conducted a wholly novel experiment in the organisation of agriculture. However, at the forefront of the emergence of modern poultry farming in the United States was the active and interventionist hand of government through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In Britain, the role of innovator and coordinator fell to a small group of entrepreneurial poultry farmers and a handful of highly innovative food retailers, with one, J. Sainsbury, leading the way.