Peacock, 2023
- The price of pb meat alternatives relative to animal meat
- On the Importance of Price and Taste for Food Choice
Executive summary
Plant-based meats, like the Beyond Sausage or Impossible Burger, and cultivated meats have become a source of optimism for reducing animal-based meat usage.
- Public health, environmental, and animal welfare advocates aim to mitigate the myriad harms of meat usage.
- The price, taste, and convenience (PTC) hypothesis posits that if plant-based meat is competitive with animal-based meat on these three criteria, the large majority of current consumers would replace animal-based meat with plant-based meat.
- The PTC hypothesis rests on the premise that PTC primarily drive food choice.
The PTC hypothesis and premise are both likely false.
- A majority of current consumers would continue eating primarily animal-based meat even if plant-based meats were PTC-competitive.
- PTC do not mainly determine food choices of current consumers; social and psychological factors also play important roles.
- Although not examined here, there may exist other viable approaches to drive the replacement of animal-based meats with plant-based meats.
There is insufficient empirical evidence to more precisely estimate or optimize the current (or future) impacts of plant-based meat. To rectify this, consider funding:
- Research measuring the effects of plant-based meat sales on displacement of animal-based meat.
- Research comparing the effects of plant-based meats with other interventions to reduce animal-based meat usage.
- Informed (non-blinded) taste tests to benchmark current plant-based meats and enable measurements of taste improvement over time.
My notes
People feel a peculiar personal attachment to meat (Graça et al., 2015), believe that meat is necessary for health, feel that meat consumption is socially normative, and perceive meat as a nice and natural component of a healthy diet (Piazza et al., 2015)
Weaknesses of the PTC model
One weakness of the PTC model is that previous studies have not comprehensively examined all the reasons people eat food, instead studies have pre-selected factors and compared them.
Convenience may be 2 things: ease of preparation and ease of purchase. We might add in ease of storage.
A lower price may lead some consumers to treat plant-based meats as inferior goods—or cheap substitutes—rather than a better deal.
PB alternatives seem to be compliments, not substitutions for animal products
Zhao et al. (2022) found that plant-based meat (75% of which was the beef-like Impossible and Beyond Meat brands) acts as a complement for beef (cross-price elasticity −0.003) and pork (−0.003) and a substitute for chicken (0.008), with each elasticity reaching statistical significance at the 1% level. Meanwhile, Tonsor & Bina (2023) found basically the opposite, with plant-based meat acting as a substitute for beef (0.01) and pork (0.11) but a complement for chicken (−0.04), with all but beef reaching statistical significance at the 5% level.
Richie: A possible assumption of the PTC model is the idea that consumers have reached "peak animal products". i.e that making products that are better on certain dimensions than animal products means they'd directly replace animal products and not other components of their diet. For example. Imagine the oversimplified case that I drinks cows milk, and I don't drink more solely because I consider it to be bad for the environment. Imagine you introduce a milk alternative, identical in every way except with an environmental impact of basically zero. One
suppose a study found that 25% of consumers order a plant-based rather than animal-based burger. A naive interpretation of this result is that the availability of a plant-based burger causes a 25% reduction in animal-based burgers. However, the result could, in fact, represent no effect at all if, given the option, those consumers would not have purchased an animal-based burger anyway. Instead, they may have chosen a different plant-based meal or purchased nothing at al
Hypothetical discrete choice experiments
Hypothetical discrete choice experiments (HDCEs) provide some relatively weak tests of the PTC hypothesis. HDCEs generally ask consumers to imagine hypothetically picking a plant- or animal-based burger from a menu. The menu usually includes randomly selected prices, which are then analyzed to produce estimates of selection rates when prices are equal. Participants are often told that the burgers taste the same or similar, and they are presented as if they are prepared and ready to eat. Thus, at least in a hypothetical setting, these studies obtain PTC-competitiveness.
Van Loo et al., 2020 found that 9% of consumers might purchase an equally priced plant-based or cultivated meat burger instead of an animal-based burger, which increased to 27% when they also added that the burger would taste exactly the same.
A second study indicated that “all burgers taste the same” and found that 70% of a Canadian sample would purchase the beef burger, 25% the plant-based burger, and 5% would make no purchase when prices were equal (Slade, 2018). When asked, only 8% of respondents believed all the burgers would taste the same.
A third study compared a “Beef Burger” and “Beyond Meat Burger” without any indication of taste equivalence. At equal price, 22% of US grocery shoppers (excluding participants who would opt to buy neither) would select the Beyond Burger (Tonsor et al., 2021, fig. 20; Tonsor et al., 2022, p. 5). A fourth study compared “plant-based meat-like burgers” and conventional hamburgers at equal prices after providing participants with information about both, including that the plant-based meat was “very meat-like in terms of texture, color and taste” (Carlsson et al., 2022, p. 24). Only 11% of Swedish hamburger consumers selected the plant-based meat option (Carlsson et al., 2022, Table 2).
A series of surveys asked a similar question: whether participants preferred “real meat from animals” or “meat-like alternatives made from plants,” without reference to specific products or the option not to purchase (Miller, 2021). Conducted in June 2020 across 27 countries, 27,000 meat-eating participants were told to assume plant-based meat and animal-based meat “tasted equally good, had equal nutritional value and cost the same.” 41% of the total sample preferred plant-based meat; a slight majority (51–55%) in five of the countries preferred plant-based meat, 63% in Mexico, and 66% in Vietnam.
One comparison found that in a hypothetical choice, 59% of meals selected were meat-free, while in actuality, sales data found only 36% of meals to be meat-free (Brachem et al., 2019, p. 22).
kea sells plant-based hotdogs that are equally or lower-priced, readily available alongside animal-based hot dogs, and “received a 95 percent approval rating” in taste testing in Sweden (Webber, 2019). In September 2019, Ikea’s plant-based hot dogs composed about 8% of annual hot dog sales globally (Southey, 2019).4 Similarly, a sample of 350 locations of the fast-food chain Burger King indicates that Impossible Burgers represent about 15% of total burger sales,5 and the sales of beef burgers “had not fallen as a result” (Mehta & Balu, 2019).
Richie: the availability heuristic suggests that asking consumers to choose between 2 products can go wrong if one product is vastly easier to imagine than the other. Which is the case with PB foods. You're asking consumers to compare a food they eat regularly to a hypothetical food that they might not be able to easily imagine existing.
Why PB products complement, rather than substitute animal products.
Another option is that consumers are irrational in their "mental accounting" of the pros and cons of foods. Imagine this: I eat beef. I know it's bad for the environment and that plant based alt beef burgers are "good" for environment in some vague way. Logically, to reduce my environmental impact I should replace beef burgers with alt beef ones. But what if simply buying the alt beef burgers makes me feel like I'm doing the environment a favour, regardless of whether I change my beef consumption? After all, for consumers to make the first, 'logical' tradeoff, it requires considering their diet as a whole whenever they make a purchase of beef or alt beef. Instead, they might just follow a 'purchase by purchase' approach, and have a heuristic of "if i buy products that are good for the environment, I am doing well". In this latter case consumers are not considering their diet as a whole, but rather just following a strategy of "buy more environmentally friendly products". This heuristic does not require them to mentally simulate the impact of specific purchases on the environmental impact of their entire diet.
Convenience
A non-randomized study of 108 grocery stores found the move increased sales of plant-based meat but did not decrease sales of animal-based meat (Piernas et al., 2021). Another smaller non-randomized study of nine stores found a very small increase in plant-based meat sales and no evidence of an effect on animal-based meat sales (Vandenbroele et al., 2019).
Perception matters for taste
In Sogari et al. (2023), 175 American consumers were randomized to blind and informed conditions, tasted four burgers (Beyond Burger, called “pea protein”; Impossible Burger, called “animal-like protein”; “hybrid meat-mushroom” burger; and “100% beef” burger), and then ranked their preference for each burger. Informing participants of the burgers’ identities (for example, “pea protein burger”) caused a statistically significant drop in the Beyond Burger’s rank from third to fourth most liked, while the Impossible Burger remained first.
In Caputo et al. (2022), 86 American consumers were randomized to blind and informed conditions, tasted four burgers (Beyond, Impossible, hybrid meat-mushroom, and 100% beef burger), and then participated in an experiment to measure willingness-to-pay for the burgers. Differences in willingness-to-pay between conditions did not reach significance given the small sample size
In Martin et al. (2021), 102 French consumers sampled both an animal- and plant-based sausage, first blinded and then with packaging information, and marked the strength of their preference on a scale ranging from animal-based (−10) to plant-based (10). After seeing the packaging, a statistically significant shift in preferences in favor of the plant-based sausage was detected (from −6.2 to−4.3), although consumers still strongly preferred the animal-based sausage.
In Schouteten et al. (2016), 53 consumers sampled both an animal- and plant-based burger, first blinded and then with packaging information. In contrast to the previous results, a meaningful effect of information was not detected, with average overall liking on a 9-point scale increasing by 0.2 from 4.7 for a plant-based burger and increasing by 0.2 from 6.5 for an animal-based burger. Note that this plant-based burger was slightly disliked, and the confidence intervals for these effects would be wide.
My thoughts: blind taste tests can tell us whether actual taste needs improving or just branding and familiarity. Also, the question of whether a PBMA tastes the same as the animal product is important because if it tastes different then consumers not only have to change buying habits, they also have to change cooking habits. I see a role for both "same tasting" and "different, great tasting" PBMA's, because people often like to have new food experiences, but they also strongly value old and familiar ones and we need to tackle both.
Taste test outcomes
In terms of taste, Sogari et al. (2023) found the Impossible Burger’s mean preference ranking in a blind taste test was not statistically significantly different than a beef burger (2.1 vs 2.5, respectively, indicating both burgers ranked around second on average) Another blind taste test found that the Impossible burger patty had a similar
average liking score to a beef burger (Chicken and Burger Alternatives, 2018).6 Moreover, complete meals containing plant-based meats tend to be somewhat better liked than plant-based meats on their own (Hoek et al., 2012, Table 6; Qammar et al., 2010, p. 554), although this trend may not be universal (Elzerman et al., 2011, fig. 2).
- Taste can be broken down into texture, flavour, aroma, and visual cues.
Of course, plant-based meats need to taste good to gain consumer acceptance, but there is little evidence that tasting identical to animal-based meat is essential
If we reach price parity, what determines whether someone picks a cheaper meat vs plant based meat.
Is there an uncanny valley effect for PB meats?
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"Which would you choose of these 2 products you've not bought or considered" is differnt to "you buy this normally, what factors would make you switch?"
Would people be more likely to switch to a PB cheese when it's the same brand that you get dairy cheese from?
Research agenda to refine and test the PTC model
- A qualitative study or literature review to comprehensively identify all reasons for food purchasing decisions.
- More taste tests of plant-based meats that test whether it tastes equally good or better, not whether it tastes similar.
- We also need unblinded taste tests as consumers are usually not blinded.