Getting your foot in the door can be the hardest part of attracting new customers, particularly with once-upon-a-time niche items like vegetarian foods. However, with new business models sprouting up each day, more and more options are becoming available to get the word out.

Selling doesn’t just take place in the aisles of grocery stores anymore. Those days are long gone — in fact, selling is often taking place on laptops, on cell phones, and most recently, on iPads! A new study from Nielsen finds that the world spends over 110 billion minutes on social media networks and blog sites, which is equal to 2% of all time spent online or one in every four and a half minutes spent online per user.

According to research from Mambo Sprouts Marketing, functional foods — items that provide additional health-promoting or disease-preventing attributes beyond their basic nutritional properties — are making a big splash with consumers and offer another way for manufacturers to differentiate their products.

No matter where you stand on meat analogues, it’s been hard to miss the latest news that scientists at the University of Missouri have come up with a soy-based product that very closely imitates chicken flesh. This latest food breakthrough is featured in the upcoming issue of Time Magazine, which touts that this is the “first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh.”

A newly published survey of nearly 6,000 vegetarians from the United Kingdom estimates that vegetarians make up about 6% of the adult U.K. population. Moreover, “lapsed vegetarians” (those who tried the diet and moved away) make up about one-tenth of the U.K. population.