Real Madrid teams up with Leeds plant-based brand Meatless Farm to promote sustainable eating

Meatless Farm was founded in 2016 and is now one of the UK's fastest growing plant-based brands.

The company sells plant-based mince, sausages and burger patties which on average use 90 per cent less land and 70-80 per cent less water to produce versus their meat counterparts.

Meatless Farm has now gone global, teaming up with Real Madrid to raise awareness of the environmental impact of food.

The club's nutritionists will work with Meatless Farm to show how plant-based food can work within a performance-based diet and the club’s players share their experience of reducing meat in their diet.

The partnership comes after Real Madrid became the first football club to sign up as a participant of the UN Global Compact – the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world.

It follows a four-year refurbishment of the iconic Bernabéu stadium, which will help to make the ground more sustainable.

The founder of Meatless Farm, Morten Toft Bech, said: “The plant-based sector has grown massively in the last couple of years but we need to move faster if we are to address the urgency of the climate crisis and the role food plays in that.

"We know there is still a huge gap in consumer understanding of the positive impact reducing meat consumption can have on the environment so we have to reach far beyond vegetarians and vegans and significantly increase the ‘meat-lessers’ – encouraging everyone to reduce their meat consumption and increase their plant-based eating.

"For example, in a country like the UK we could reduce around eight per cent of the UK’s total emissions if we all had just one less meat meal per week."

Mr Toft Bech said that his mission is to reduce the world’s dependency on intensively farmed meat and encourage a rise in ‘ecotarian’ eating – eating for the good of the environment.

The brand has expanded worldwide, now operating in 24 different countries including Germany, Portugal and Spain.

Real Madrid's institutional relations director, Emilio Butragueño, added: “Meatless Farm brings together both sustainability and nutrition, two elements that are central to Real Madrid’s club and business strategy.

"As a global brand we have an important role to play in engaging communities to make real changes that help create a more sustainable world and improve personal health and performance.”

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