It is one of the loudest chef reversals of the decade. And the reason Flora paid him to do it says more about the dairy market than about Ramsay.
For most of the 2010s, Gordon Ramsay ran a very specific comedy routine on vegans.
He said he was allergic to them.
He mocked plant-based menus.
He built a career, in part, on being the last serious chef who would not be caught cooking with an oat milk.
In 2025 he became Flora’s paid global ambassador.
In 2026 he is fronting a rolling international campaign called Skip The Cow, telling home cooks that a dairy-free spread is perfectly capable of baking a fucking great cake, in his phrasing, and that a real chef would use it without hesitation.
This is not just a celebrity deal. It is a signal, and Flora paid a lot of money to send it.
The 20-second spot is deliberately absurd. A narrator asks Susan the cow, a mascot from Flora’s previous campaigns, whether the plant-based butter works well for baking.
Susan nods enthusiastically.
The narrator responds that a cow saying yes might seem slightly biased. He suggests bringing in an expert.
Cut to Ramsay, seated on top of the cow, holding a chocolate cake. His line is short and unprintable.
It works because it lets Ramsay be Ramsay.
Loud, dismissive, and completely certain, but this time about the plant-based product rather than against it.
Flora Food Group, formerly Upfield, has been fully plant-based since October 2023. Its entire product line is now dairy-free.
That is a major business bet. And the audience Flora needs to convert is not us. Vegans already buy the product.
The audience Flora needs is the mainstream British and European home cook who still, in 2026, subconsciously thinks that a butter substitute must be worse than dairy.
Nothing on earth breaks that assumption faster than an eight-Michelin-starred chef known for being mean about vegan food saying, on camera, that the product is good.
The company claims Flora spreads have a 75 percent lower climate impact than dairy butter.
hat figure comes from Flora’s own analysis, so worth reading with appropriate scepticism. But the direction of travel is not in dispute.
Every independent life-cycle assessment of dairy butter versus plant spreads over the last five years has landed in the same broad territory.
To his credit, and this is not a phrase we use lightly about Ramsay, he did not just show up for a paycheck.
In the campaign materials he described putting the product through its paces, from scrambled eggs to chocolate cake.
He specifically said it gave him the creaminess and rich taste he would expect from butter, with a lower environmental footprint.
This is meaningful because Ramsay has walked away from bad restaurant food, bad seafood, and bad wagyu on live television. A public endorsement is a career-adjacent claim for him. It is not a favour.
The dairy industry has been watching the plant-based butter category with growing unease.
Plant milks broke through in the 2010s. Plant butter has taken longer, mostly because performance in baking and searing is genuinely harder to replicate than a coffee-shop cortado.
Flora getting Ramsay is the first mainstream signal that the performance gap has narrowed enough for professional chefs to publicly stand behind it.
That matters commercially. Grocery buyers watch celebrity chef signals.
Own-label dairy alternatives follow branded ones.
And once own-label plant butter improves in quality, the price of the switch drops for the average shopper.
For a wider read on how the food industry is shifting under this kind of pressure, our piece on why restaurants sell more plant-based food when they stop calling it vegan covers the labelling side of the same story.
The bit that is a little uncomfortable, if you liked Ramsay for his 2010s persona, is that this is at least his second high-profile plant-based endorsement.
He was in a Silk oat milk ad in 2021.
He is an investor and advisor to Borealis Foods, which makes plant-based instant noodles under the Chef Woo brand.
This is not a one-off. It is a career pivot playing out slowly.
Whether it is a genuine change of heart or an extremely good read of where consumer food money is moving next, only he knows. Both explanations are possible. Both are, honestly, fine.
For anyone reading this and wondering whether plant butter really works for baking, the honest answer is: mostly yes, with some quirks.
It performs well in cakes, cookies, and quick breads, which is where Flora has focused.
Laminated doughs like croissants remain genuinely difficult without dairy butter, and no chef claim, however loud, changes that yet.
If you are new to baking with plant butter, our category page on vegan recipes has starter recipes that work reliably on the first try.
It would be easy to be cynical about a big-name chef being paid to endorse a dairy alternative he once mocked. But the more interesting read is the market one.
A category with genuine mainstream traction can afford to hire the person who used to make fun of it. That is the sound of a food business quietly winning.
The next time your family is over and someone jokes that vegan butter cannot possibly be as good as the real thing, you can point at the eight-Michelin-starred man sitting on a cow and let the argument end there.
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