Shallow overview of institutional plant-based meal campaigns in the US and Western Europe (Rethink Priorities)

#institutional_change EU USA

Executive summary

This report provides a shallow overview of the potential for impactful opportunities from institutional plant-based meal campaigns in the U.S., France, Germany, UK, Spain, and Italy based on reviewing existing research and speaking with organizations conducting such campaigns.
Campaigns that seek to make plant-based meals the default or set ambitious targets to reduce animal product purchases appear to offer potentially large effects. However, these campaigns may have lower chances of winning these changes and ensuring they are held, compared to less restrictive changes like offering more plant-based options every day.
When designing changes, one should emphasize reducing all animal products in order to avoid substitution from beef and lamb to chicken, seafood, and eggs, which require more animals to be harmed.
It appears that most large schools and universities in the U.S., France, and Germany offer regular meatless meal options. This leaves fewer opportunities available for campaigns to secure more of these particular changes. We have not seen strong evidence yet that organizations are winning much stronger changes affecting meals available or served at a large enough scale to offer significant impact.
It appears that classroom offerings of meatless meals in Italy, Spain, and the UK are far less widespread, leaving potential room for impact from further work there. However, because we spent less time researching these countries, further research is recommended to confirm the scale of this potential opportunity, such as supporting a group to replicate these studies (Essere Animali 2024, Ottonova 2022).
The cost-effectiveness of campaigns to win such changes seems to depend on the ambition of the change requested, the relatively high campaign costs even for small wins, and the uncertainty around costs needed to ensure this change is maintained over time. Cost-effectiveness can quickly hit diminishing returns where existing coverage is high and the extent of large-scale opportunities remaining is limited.
High-impact opportunities may be in securing stronger changes from large institutions or catering companies that serve many institutions (e.g., plant-based defaults or high % animal product purchase reductions), expanding the size of commitments secured by relatively low-cost student-led university campaigns, or securing even more modest changes such as plant-based options every day in Italy, Spain, and the UK where existing coverage appears to be low.