‘Truly nascent’: Violife’s chief growth officer on making plant-based cheese mainstream

The brand, which launched in 2013, is part of the Greek plant-based food company Arivia. But it didn’t hit U.S. shelves until 2015. Since then, Violife has taken off. It is now the number one plant-based cheese in the world — and it continues to roll out new products to continue its growth streak.

According to Violife’s global president and chief growth officer Olga Osminkina-Jones, the current strategy is to make plant-based cheese into a mainstream product.

“The category itself is truly nascent,” she said.

Osminkina-Jones is a consumer brand veteran. Before joining Violife, she held vp-level roles at companies like PepsiCo, Danone and Heineken. The reason she decided to go to a plant-based food startup, she said, was “to take on a challenge like the reinvention and acceleration of a category.”

And indeed that’s the project ahead. So far, things seem to be working. Violife is in most major grocers and continues to launch new products. Most recently, it unveiled a new cream cheese product that could be used in baked products.

But the real hurdle isn’t about shelf space, but in getting more people to try the product. In many ways, what plant-based cheese needs is an Oatly moment.

“As you look at the trajectories of such categories as plant-based milk, you can clearly see that the scale of adoption was equally propelled by the collaborations and partnerships with the right channels and customers,” Osminkina-Jones said.

With that, the focus is on getting more people familiar with the product so that the overall category can continue to grow. While Violife is in a good position as the category leader, Osminkina-Jones knows there’s still a lot of work ahead.

“The key here is not to run before we can walk,” she said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Growing a nascent category
“We are the one and only truly global plant-based cheese brand. And we are number one globally already. However, the category itself is truly nascent. Effectively, less than 2% of cheese today is plant-based cheese. And we are on a mission to unleash the potential. If you think of yogurts, for example, already 5% of total yogurt consumption is plant-based. And when you think about milk, almost 20% of consumption is plant-based. So we are on a mission to really unleash this last frontier of the plant-based categories, which is in our case, animal-free cheeses.”

Why the brand is focused on international growth
“The agenda for the brand has been global from rather early days. And the reason for that was a quest to make sure that we effectively democratize the category. We are on a journey of building out a totally new type of category — a totally new type of business. The penetration of animal-free or plant-based cheeses is fairly low still around the world. So sticking to one country would inherently limit our ability to grow the scale and appeal of this category.”

Replicating the Oatly playbook
“As you look at the trajectories of such categories as plant-based milk, you can clearly see that the scale of adoption [for plant-based products] was equally propelled by the collaborations and partnerships with the right channels and customers. Think of oat milk and baristas — and positioning oat milk as maybe even better for a cappuccino. Very mainstream behavior — drinking a cappuccino and putting the new alternative category right at the heart of it — was a big propeller for that category growth. So we are looking at the channel mix very similarly.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Osminkina-Jones’s title. She is Violife’s chief growth officer.