The Good Food Institute (GFI), the Washington, DC-based non-profit that works to advance plant-based, fermentation-derived and cultivated alternatives to conventional meat, laid off six employees in its US team on Thursday, 5 November, and eliminated seven further roles that had been left vacant, Green Queen reported.
Interim chief executive Rachel Lichte told staff in an email that GFI's annual revenue had stayed at roughly $32 million while its budgets kept growing, and that the organisation had drawn on reserves for several years to cover the gap. "We cannot continue drawing down our reserves at the current rate," she wrote.
According to Sheila Voss, the senior vice-president of communications, the US team most recently had 110 employees, so the layoffs affect about 5% of them. Voss is herself leaving after six years, a decision she said was separate from the cuts. GFI said it plans no further redundancies for now and that the six affiliate offices in Europe, Brazil, India, Israel, Asia-Pacific and Japan make their own staffing decisions, with their dollar budgets expected to stay flat.
A source familiar with the situation told Green Queen the affected employees had no clear warning and lost system access in the middle of the day. GFI disputed that, saying Lichte had given weekly or fortnightly updates and had announced the week before that layoffs would be needed to meet budget targets. Each affected employee received severance details on 5 November.
Voss said the roles were chosen against GFI's 2027 priorities, with a sharper focus on the technical barriers facing alternative proteins. She described a shift towards more hands-on work, including market-shaping, steering research and student groups to technical bottlenecks, and buying cell lines from companies going through insolvency.
The cuts come in a hard year for the sector. Green Queen noted that global funding for alternative protein companies fell in 2025 to a seven-year low, below $1 billion for the first time since 2018, and that US sales of plant-based food dipped by 2% last year. GFI said it does not link that decline to its own fundraising, while acknowledging the sector's difficulties.
Between 2022 and 2025, 52% of GFI's donations came from individuals and 46% from foundations, with corporations giving 1%. The US team will meet on Monday, 9 November, to discuss what comes next. Green Queen's report was written by Anay Mridul.
Photo: Mx. Granger / Wikimedia Commons (CC0), a plant-based burger, used to illustrate the sector
Source: Green Queen
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