Good morning. Meatballs built IKEA’s food empire but its plant balls failed to make a dent in the MAGA era – more on that below, along with Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension and Donald Trump’s state visit. But first:

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• Canada and Mexico will sign a strategic partnership during Carney’s visit
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Forty years ago, not long after the Poäng armchair’s debut, IKEA launched its meatballs into the world. Very quickly, they eclipsed wildest expectations – everybody wanted a taste. More than one billion IKEA meatballs are now sold around the world annually. In the Philippines, you can get them in a 63-piece meatball bucket. In the States, you can get a “meatball sundae,” which is not the name I’d have chosen for a cup of meatballs with cream sauce, mashed potatoes and lingonberry jam.

Five years ago, IKEA tried to build on this massive success with a different sphere: the plant ball, a Swedish meatball dupe fashioned out of pea protein. In its marketing campaign, the company positioned the dish as a win-win, “just as tasty as meat!” and far better for the planet. But as Dakshana Bascaramurty, The Globe’s food culture reporter, discovers in her latest feature, IKEA hasn’t been able to recapture lightning in a meatball. Sales have been a resounding disappointment. Across Canada, where customers gobble up 40 million meatballs each year, the plant ball remains one of the least-ordered items on the menu.

Beyond the bubble

It’s easy to understand why IKEA felt so bullish about plant-based meat. When Beyond Meat went public in May of 2019, it was valued at US$3.7-billion, and within a few months, its shares jumped tenfold to US$240. That same year, Impossible Foods’ soy burger nabbed a United Nations Global Climate Action Award. Fast-food giants like McDonald’s, KFC and Taco Bell raced to partner with meatless companies, while Maple Leaf Canada spent US$260-million buying various plant-based protein brands.

And then the bottom pretty much fell out of the industry. The pandemic didn’t help, with labour disruptions, supply shortages and shipping delays. But investors had clearly misjudged the appetite for alternative meat. After hitting US$1-billion in 2020, U.S. sales of plant-based meat began steadily falling: by 19 per cent in 2023, then 28 per cent in 2024. Beyond Meat suffered a 98-per-cent drop in its share price, all the way down to US$2.35 earlier this month.

There’s the cost, for sure: Plant-based meat is typically at least twice as expensive as the traditional stuff. There’s the Ozempic of it all: People on GLP-1 drugs need to consume more protein, and meat is a good source. But when you’ve got U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touting the virtues of beef tallow and something he calls the “carnivore diet,” there’s another culprit at work. MAGA has won its culture war over meat.

What’s at steak

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump issued dire warnings that Democrats “want to take away your hamburgers.” Tucker Carlson used his documentary The End of Men to push organ meat as the solution to testosterone woes. Plant-based alternatives are tangled up with the insufficiently masculine or suspiciously woke – JD Vance is just one of many podcast guests who leaned into a mic and sniffed about “soy boys.” MAGA hangout Butterworth’s now fields so many bone-marrow orders that the D.C. restaurant blows through 500 beef bones a week. It’s Steve Bannon’s preferred item on the menu, which he’s praised for being “not effete.”

Even the chief executive of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown, is resigned to the cultural shift. “It’s not our moment, we recognize that, you’d be crazy to think it is,” he told The Guardian recently. “The political culture is different. We just need to get through this period.”

But he may have landed on a solution: less plant-based meat, more … plants. In July, Beyond (yup, they dropped the “Meat” from the name) unveiled a fava-bean burger that promises to taste like veggies instead of “imitation beef, pork or chicken.” That same spirit prompted McDonald’s Canada to add a McVeggie to its menu this week, after an alternative-meat patty tanked. “It wasn’t quite what consumers are looking for,” chief marketing officer Francesca Cardarelli conceded. With the McVeggie sandwich, “you can really see the vegetable.”

And now IKEA is getting in on the action. The company’s global food designer, Daniel Yngvesson, spent a year and a half perfecting a new menu item, heading out on research trips, tweaking prototypes, finessing the shape. This little ball, available at Canadian stores in late autumn, will masquerade as meat no longer. The dish? IKEA falafel.

U.S. President Donald Trump heaped praise on King Charles III during a lavish banquet at Windsor Castle last night, wrapping up a day of pomp and circumstance complete with marching soldiers, a Royal Air Force flypast and a visit to Queen Elizabeth’s tomb. Read more about the state visit here.