12 December 2023, 10:25
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A vegan food firm founded by Sir Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills has gone into administration.
Ms Mills blamed the ‘gaslighting’ meat industry for the collapse of VBites, as well as the rising cost of raw materials and energy prices.
In a statement on the firm’s website she said she was ‘devastated’ at the collapse.
The firm makes meat-free sausages, burgers and fish fingers and called itself the ‘original plant-based food pioneers’.
She said the firm going under was “extremely distressing for me on a personal level but also for my wonderfully loyal and hard-working staff.”
She added: “It is unsurprising and inevitable that where profits are to be made, amorphous corporate entities will follow and unfortunately their practices too often undermine the entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility and agility of movement that saw plant-based entrepreneurs have so much success.
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“There is too often a tendency to treat their investments as short-term experiments and opportunistic flights of fancy, embalm them in restrictive governance and then either walk away or enforce a takeover when the market hits a bump.”
Ms Mills said she had invested “tens of millions of pounds” of her own money into VBites.
In August, Beyond Meat said sales had fallen by almost a third over the previous three months. Sausage maker Heck slashed its range of meat-free products from ten to two.
Sales of vegan products have been hit as shoppers grapple with high prices as meat-free alternatives are often more expensive.