Why One Planet Pizza Took A Leap Into the Lagging Frozen Plant-Based Meal Category

British startup One Planet Pizza is expanding into the “underperforming” frozen meal space with high-protein plant-based comfort food classics, on the back of a 70% surge in revenue this year.

It was in 2016 that Mike and Joe Hill began making vegan pizzas in their family kitchen. A decade on, the father-son duo helm a business that sells frozen pizzas across UK supermarkets and rakes in over a million pounds a year.

To usher in the next chapter for One Planet Pizza, the Hills are now broadening their horizons by aiming for a slice of the plant-based meal category, which they say has been underperforming.

“I think one of the challenges is giving people outside the vegan community a compelling reason to pick them up,” says Joe. “Being plant-based alone won’t guarantee sales. The food has to look appetising, taste fantastic, feel properly satisfying and offer good value. There are also perceptions around plant-based food being overly processed or lacking protein.”

Indeed, around one in three Brits buy ready meals specifically for their taste. Health is next on that list of motivators, as consumers seek natural recipes and transparency around salt, sugar and fat content.

This is the gap One Planet Pizza is trying to fill with its new meals, having rolled out tofu tikka masala, mac and cheese, and vegetable and lentil ragù lasagna at 276 Asda stores this month. “We’ve developed familiar comfort-food favourites with protein, fibre and ingredients people recognise, including veggies, tofu, lentils and beans,” says Joe.

It comes on the back of its first million-pound year. The 10-year-old startup recorded £1.2M in revenue in 2025, and so far this year, this has grown by 70%. “We’re now forecasting approximately £2M in revenue for the year,” he reveals. “What’s particularly encouraging is that we’ve improved our margins and profitability alongside that growth. We’re building a business that can support its next stage of development.”

Nailing the taste, nutrition and manufacturing setup the ‘hardest’ part

One Planet Pizza’s frozen pizzas and flatbreads are listed in over 1,000 stores across Asda, Morrisons, Co-op, with 205 of Iceland’s Food Warehouse stores set to join the list.

The startup always wanted to move into new categories. “Pizza was our starting point, but we’ve never seen ourselves as just a pizza company,” says Joe. “Ready meals felt like a natural next step. We wanted to bring our flavour, fun and personality to everyday meals, while making them convenient and nutritionally dense.”

Finding the right manufacturing partner was a lofty challenge. Where its pizzas are produced through a contract manufacturer in Hungary, Joe describes the meals as “quite a specific range” that called for a factory that still specialised in small-batch runs.

“Our new ready meals are produced right here in the UK. Our meals partner combines the capacity to support supermarket distribution with a hands-on approach to cooking up our recipes with care in small batches. These unique partnerships allow us to run a lean team laser-focused on product development, our retail relationships, and building the brand at scale,” he says.

“We spent eight months developing the range closely with our manufacturing partner. The hardest part was balancing taste and nutrition. Every time we adjusted a sauce or changed an ingredient, we had to check what that meant for the protein, fibre and veggie content.”

The range incudes a tofu tikka masala with sweet potatoes, cauliflower, edamame beans, yellow split peas, and basmati rice (deliver 24g of protein), a mac and cheese with a soy milk, butter bean and vegan cheese sauce (22g of protein), and a ragù lasagna with vegetables, lentils, pearl barleys, soy milk béchamel, and vegan cheese (15g of protein). Each 400g pack is priced at £3.85.

Vegan frozen meals decline despite wider category growth

The company conducted research to find out what people actually look for when choosing a frozen ready meal. “One of the most striking findings was the gap between the overall frozen ready-meal market and its meat-free segment,” says Joe.

“The data we reviewed put frozen ready meals at £466M, growing by 9.2% in value, while vegetable and plant-based frozen meals were down by 9.6%,” he outlines.

“Yet chilled meat-free meals were growing by 12.7% and reaching far more households: 30.6%, compared with 17.8% for frozen. That suggested there was an opportunity to give more people a reason to choose meat-free meals from the freezer.

“Alongside that, the wider research highlighted demand for healthier food, recognisable ingredients, protein and fibre. That helped shape our brief: familiar comfort food that delivers on taste, convenience and nutrition.”

This aligns with other research that shows 43% of Brits increased their protein intake in 2025, and sales of protein-based foods hiked by nearly 10% in the six months to January 24, with 57% of shoppers following a high-protein diet to some extent.

Research by Ocado last year showed that 52% of UK adults were actively trying to add more fibre to their diets. And meal delivery startup HelloFresh found that 65% of them have been trying to eat more fibre compared to five years ago. These shifts are doubtless driven by online trends like protein- and fibremaxxing, the 30-plants-a-week movement for gut health, and the rise of GLP-1 drugs.

“We want someone who normally buys a chicken curry or a meat-based lasagne to look at ours and think: ‘That looks delicious. I’ll give it a go,'” Joe says of the new One Planet Meals range. “The nutrition might help convince someone to buy it once. The taste has to bring them back.”

One Planet Pizza eyes air-fryer market and other frozen categories

Between 2025 and 2026, the company’s growth in major retail sales hit 137%. “A big part of that has been getting our pizzas into more stores, boosted by a one-off launch for Veganuary with Aldi. But winning distribution is only the beginning. You have to give people a reason to keep buying,” says Joe.

“We’ve worked incredibly hard on taste, product quality, value for money, and financially supporting our retail listings. We’ve also improved our manufacturing and operations so we can support growth more efficiently,” he adds.

“I’d love to say it was our good looks and sparkling personalities, but I suspect the retailers might disagree,” the One Planet Pizza co-founder says, only half-jokingly. “I do also think our personality helps. We’re a father-and-son business with a clear mission. We take the food seriously, but we’re happy to have a bit of fun along the way.”

Its pizzas’ listing in UK retailers provides a strong foundation for the meals launch, which he hopes will give the brand a chance to reach people “who might never have picked up one of our pizzas and introduce them to the wider One Planet brand”.

While its immediate priority is to make the meals a success, the company doesn’t intend to stop here. “We’re also looking at other trend-led ready meal flavours and further pizza innovation, including products designed for air fryers. Beyond that, we’re exploring other frozen categories, although it’s too early to share specifics,” he says.

“The same principle applies to everything we create: it has to taste fantastic, offer great value and give people a reason to come back. We’re ambitious, but we want to build each part of the range properly.”

The junior Hill says One Planet Pizza is in a “much stronger financial position” than a few years ago, but isn’t currently seeking external investment. “We’ve worked hard on manufacturing costs, gross margins and operational efficiency, and those improvements are helping us generate cash to reinvest in the business,” he notes.

“Our ambition is to become one of the UK’s leading plant-based frozen food brands by 2030, with taste and a ‘better-for-you’ factor at the heart of the range. Dad and I have spent 10 years building the foundations. It’s exciting to see what we can do from here.”