As IKEA’s iconic meatball turns 40, the company looks to its plant-based future | Canada Voices

IKEA’s food lab in Sweden has the tidy sterility of a movie set. The walls are tiled in white and everything else, from the cookware to work surfaces to appliances, is stainless steel.

This past June, Daniel Yngvesson, the multinational’s global food designer, was preparing a meal there. He opened the door of a standing freezer to reveal its contents: like a cartoon gag, it contained bags and bags of frozen meatballs. The world’s most famous meatballs.

A note to readers: The Globe introduces new design for Life, Culture and Style sections

As with all of IKEA’s offerings, from the Lack coffee table to Poang chair, their bestselling menu item has a Swedish product name: Huvudroll. It translates to “main character.”

On the surface, the Swedish meatball does not exude main character energy. The small bronzed sphere looks like any old meatball. But it’s a global crowd-pleaser, loved by toddlers with freshly sprouted teeth, seniors sporting fake teeth and everyone in between. IKEA sells more than one billion Swedish meatballs annually. In Canada, about 40 million were sold last year.

This fall, IKEA is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the meatball’s debut with new meatball-forward menu items. In Canada, there will be a meatball poutine and a meatball naan wrap.

But while the company marks this occasion, it’s also actively trying to sell fewer meatballs.

IKEA’s ambitious climate goals are to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 per cent (compared with its 2016 baseline) by 2030. Much of that will come down to the materials used in their furniture and accessories, but they also want to halve emissions in food production.

That means transitioning to a menu with less meat on it – a shift that customers haven’t embraced as quickly as IKEA would like.

In Yngvesson’s test kitchen, that means dreaming up new plant-based members of the “food ball family” that will have as much main character energy as the original to win people over.

But for shoppers, will it ever be possible to give up such a defining part of the IKEA shopping experience?

‘One meatball for the world’

For the first 27 years of the company’s existence, there was no IKEA meatball. In 1958, a few months after IKEA’s late founder Ingvar Kamprad opened his first store in Almhult, a town in the middle of the Swedish forest, he noticed people would spend hours shopping and then abruptly leave, sometimes abandoning products before going to the checkout. He followed them – all the way to the local hot-dog stand, where they were getting lunch. If IKEA offered cheap meals, people wouldn’t have to leave and would spend more, he thought.

The store’s initial offerings were coffee and cold dishes, but in the 1960s that evolved into traditional cuisine from the Swedish region of Smaland, including sausages, mash and potato dumplings. Throughout the sixties and seventies, IKEA expanded throughout Europe, and then abroad; some restaurants served Swedish cuisine and some served local dishes. One manager who travelled to all the European stores reported back to head office that the quality at many locations was “very poor.”

In 1984, Kamprad and other executives decided to create a cohesive global restaurant concept for dozens of stores worldwide and built a team to tackle the project. They wanted a menu that was small and very Swedish.

Severin Sjostedt, a young chef who’d worked in Michelin-starred restaurants across Europe, was hired as the chef leading the operation.

“Ingvar was very clear that he wanted one meatball for the world,” Sjostedt said in an interview from his home in Stockholm. “That was my mission.”

Kamprad wanted the IKEA meatball to be served the traditional Swedish way with cream sauce, green peas, mashed potatoes and lingonberry sauce. He wanted it to be cheap, but also to be served on a proper plate with silverware.

Sjostedt had plenty of experience making Swedish meatballs (which, by the way, are actually Turkish in origin and were brought over in the 18th century by King Charles XII, who had spent a few years in the Ottoman Empire). He’d eaten them since childhood and had cooked them at home and in fine-dining restaurants. But never before at this scale.

His test batches, which sometimes held 1,500 kilograms of meat, would taste completely different from the 500g recipe he was used to. The volumes were so massive he’d have to wear a helmet and climb a ladder to add ingredients to the giant industrial mixer used in the factory.

He also had to figure out how to preserve the texture and flavour of the meatballs after they’d been cooked, frozen, reheated and held in warming trays. And they had to taste the same in Hong Kong, Australia and Spain.

When he had a few strong contenders with different levels of spicing, Sjostedt assembled a group of IKEA staff – including Kamprad – to do a blind taste test. To the finalists he added a few extras as controls – meatballs “that I wouldn’t give my children,” he said.

After a winning version of the meatball had been selected, Sjostedt sketched out the design of the restaurant kitchens, plotting where appliances and staff would need to be to ensure that it took no longer than 15 seconds to get the meatballs and accompaniments onto a plate.

When Sjostedt went to open the first IKEA location in Italy, the store manager told him the meatballs would never fly – Italians saw that kind of meat as “leftovers.” But after three days, the store was sold out of them. They were an international hit after their 1985 debut and take-home bags of frozen meatballs, introduced in 2006, became a bestseller, too.

Love for the Swedish meatball is so deep, IKEA has found creative new ways to offer it. In the Philippines, they introduced a 63-piece meatball bucket. American stores sell a “meatball sundae”: a to-go cup of meatballs, cream sauce, mashed potatoes and lingonberry jam. Earlier this year, a few markets including the U.S. decided to upgrade the standard meatball plate from eight balls to 12.

Even the 2013 horse meat scandal didn’t seem to do any long-term damage to IKEA’s reputation or its meatball sales. Horse meat was detected in some of their meatballs sold in Europe (as well as products sold by many other companies), despite labels saying they contained only beef and pork. Since then, the company has centralized purchasing of ingredients and conducts DNA tests on every production batch of its meatballs to confirm its contents.

For many, eating IKEA food is the only exposure they have to Swedish cuisine. While many customers believe the meatballs are imported from Sweden, they are prepared in facilities around the world. The ones sold in Canada are made by the Italian food company Buona Vita Inc., which has a factory in Bridgeton, N.J.

Creating the perfect meatless ball

IKEA’s plant ball was launched in 2020 with great ambitions. It came on a plate with all the same accoutrements as the Swedish meatball and was priced lower to tempt people to try it. In a marketing video, Sharla Halvorson, former global health and sustainability manager at IKEA Food, said the plant ball was created out of a desire to reduce the company’s climate footprint. It wasn’t designed for vegetarians, but for meat eaters.

“We actually hope that we sell less meatballs,” Halvorson said.

So far, that hasn’t been the case. Elena Pozueta Larios, IKEA Canada’s food manager, described the plant ball as one of the “least-sold items” at Canadian restaurants. In fact, sales have been so disappointing that in the new menu launching this fall, it’s been recast in new dishes. There are plant ball nachos, and a dish that pairs plant balls with roasted potatoes, pesto and shaved parmesan.

Back in the food lab, Yngvesson, the food designer, is always ready to take on the challenge of making meatless products enticing. He walked me through a “sensoric analysis” – carefully evaluating the appearance, texture and taste like a sommelier might – to demonstrate how much care was put into developing the plant ball. Both the original Swedish meatball and the plant ball have a savoury aroma and, on a plate, were difficult to tell apart.

Yngvesson sliced them in half to reveal their innards: the plant ball had an earthier hue but both looked meaty and were flecked with small bits of onion. The plant ball is made with pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple – and is tasty, but certainly not meat. Yngvesson sees room for improvement.

“It has a little bit of rubberiness, a little bit of that squanchiness, springiness that you don’t always have in a meatball,” he said. He wants it to be as convincing a dupe for the original as possible.

For a year and a half, Yngvesson worked with a team of product developers and engineers to create IKEA falafel, which will be in Canadian IKEAs this fall. It’s the latest round food in their lineup – before it came the chicken ball and vegetable ball in 2015, the now-discontinued salmon ball in 2018 and 2020’s plant ball.

On a research trip, Yngvesson sampled about 25 different types of falafel while trying to figure out the specifics of IKEA’s version. Should it be carrot-forward? Leek-forward? How much parsley was too much?

During the creative phase, Yngvesson and his product development team created prototypes which were delivered to suppliers, who recreated them in their factories and sent back samples.

When I visited him at the IKEA food lab in June, he was tasting the latest version of the falafel, made from a mix of chickpeas, zucchini, onion, cumin, garlic and lots of parsley. He picked a piece up with his fork and took a deep, approving whiff of it before chewing thoughtfully.

Yngvesson speaks in the sing-songy, melodic way so many Swedes do, but underneath that carefree tone he’s a perfectionist.

It wasn’t crunchy enough, he said. The flavours were good, he noted, but could be punched up. Each piece was the right size, but the shape still needed finessing.

Like the IKEA meatball, Yngvesson turned 40 this year. Before he had ever eaten one, before his job gave him unlimited access to them, he saw his grandmother’s as the gold standard. They were made with rabbit and irregular in shape, which he found charming. But now, after years at IKEA, Yngvesson has become obsessed with sphericity.

“We’re looking for something spherical, something really round,” he said, squinting at the fried orb, like it was an unsolvable math equation. “How can we make it more round than this?”

This degree of tinkering may seem like overkill, but with the scale IKEA operates at, a great deal of research, calculations and testing goes into every new product. And as the “sensoric expert” on staff, making sure each pilaf, biscuit and shrimp sandwich tastes, smells, feels and looks right is why Yngvesson consults on every product developed in the food lab by its 110 or so employees.

So, it can be disappointing when what they’ve so carefully crafted isn’t received how they expected.

A few years ago, Yngvesson was on the team that developed a plant-based take on chicken nuggets. He paired them with an aromatic couscous and tomato-spinach ragu. He envisioned adults sitting down to eat the dish with cutlery, appreciating the range of textures, the hit of umami.

It did not sell well. The nuggets are still on the menu, but now served at the after-checkout Swedish Bistro in a cup with barbecue sauce.

“They don’t want to eat nuggets with a knife and fork. They want to dip it and eat it on the go,” he told me, with the anguish of a composer whose masterpiece has been sampled in a cat food commercial.

Food that sells sofas

One morning, Yngvesson drove me to the local IKEA in Almhult, a few kilometres from the food lab. We wandered up to the restaurant – which looked like every other IKEA restaurant I’ve seen – and people-watched.

A couple walked by holding plates of meatballs, but both had swapped out the standard mashed potatoes for French fries and had asked for four extra meatballs.

“That’s fine to do,” Yngvesson said under his breath. “It’s not how we planned it, how we designed the dish, but it’s okay.”

These aren’t just personal slights, but also illustrate how difficult it is for IKEA to make the shift to a more climate-friendly menu.

Canadian food manager Pozueta Larios mentioned three times in an interview how “meat-oriented” Canadians are, both to explain the popularity of the Swedish meatball here and the unpopularity of the plant ball.

Petra Axdorff, the company’s global food manager, puts it bluntly: “People come for the meatballs and they still want meat in the meatballs,” she said.

I met with Axdorff at the massive IKEA of Sweden building in Almhult, which has an SUV-sized Tagghaj frying pan mounted on its exterior. Almhult is the company’s design headquarters and has the feel of a university town: Every morning, thousands of employees commute in, most taking the train from other parts of Sweden or neighbouring Denmark. Employees hustle between the many sprawling buildings on campus, where the company hasn’t missed a single opportunity to make every lounge, kitchenette and meeting room look like a showroom.

I sat across from Axdorff – both of us in upholstered IKEA armchairs – in a lounge where other employees took meetings and made espresso.

When considering the future of food at IKEA, the climate objectives are important, she said, but “the price tag is number one.”

She told me Kamprad’s motive behind bringing food into the stores remains today: “We deliver food because we would like to sell the sofas.”

Indeed, data collected through the company’s loyalty program show that Canadian customers who visit the restaurant spend approximately 30 per cent more in store than those who don’t.

While overall sales at IKEA Canada increased by 6.5 per cent from 2022 to 2024, in that same period, food sales jumped by 41 per cent. In Canada, 30 per cent of people who go to an IKEA store are there only for the food.

Feeding a family at IKEA can be cheaper than picking up fast food at a drive-thru. The price of the meatball plate – $8.99 – has been static for years and Pozueta Larios said the company will absorb any inflation to keep it there.

The company still does a lot of manual tracking of customers to understand how they shop, what they’re looking for and what gets in the way of them making big purchases.

In the ground-floor market hall of IKEA stores, shoppers can fill their carts with Swedish-designed bedsheets, candles and plant pots without much thought. But upstairs, where the showrooms – and, importantly, the restaurants – are, things can get dicey.

When a family decides which sofa to buy “it’s not just a lot of testing,” says Axdorff. “It includes conflicts. The whole idea is to make sure that you’re at least not hungry during that conflict.”

On days when families are hangry and trying to decide between the Ektorp sofa and the Jattebo sectional, the Swedish meatball will be on the menu – executives say it’s not going anywhere any time soon. But product developers haven’t given up making tweaks to it to shrink its climate footprint: reducing the amount of beef in it, making the cream sauce less fatty and removing dairy from the mashed potatoes.

“We’re changing bits and pieces of this 40-year-old meatball,” said Axdorff. “It’s not the same as it was.”