When Is Vegan Meat Preferable To Animal Meat?
When discussing how to replace animal meat with plant-based alternatives, many advocates have argued that plant-based meat needs to compete in price, taste, and convenience — a.k.a. the “PTC” hypothesis. However, though some surveys support the hypothesis, there hasn’t been an extensive amount of research to confirm it.
It may be that these three factors are not enough to make plant-based meats appealing to the general public. For example, people might have personal attachments to meat, regardless of how substitutes taste and cost. They may also think that plant-based meats are generally unhealthy, or just “unnatural.”
Importantly, even when consumers do approve of plant-based meats, we don’t know if they’re actually using them to replace animal products. Instead, they might just be consuming both.
In this paper, researchers aim to understand whether most consumers would switch from animal meat to plant-based meat if the latter became PTC-competitive. They first provide a definition of each PTC element:
- Price: The difference in cost between products. If one product is cheaper, it should be more appealing. However, if something is “too” cheap, it may come across as inferior.
- Taste: How much people enjoy a product’s flavor. This is often tested using “blind taste tests” where participants taste items without knowing what they are. However, such studies don’t mimic real life, and research shows that actually being able to see what a product is can either increase or decrease preference for it.
- Convenience: This is typically defined as how easy it is to find a product (availability) or how well something is packaged, how quickly it goes bad, or how long it takes to prepare (functionality). However, a product’s availability often depends on external factors (e.g., where it’s displayed in the store) vs. the product itself.
The researchers then look at experiments testing the PTC hypothesis, to see whether PTC is truly enough to make plant-based products preferable to meat. For example, ”hypothetical discrete-choice experiments” (HDCEs) ask participants to imagine choosing between products of varied prices. In this way, researchers can look at consumers’ preferences when product prices do and don’t match.
One study found that when matched for price with meat, 19% of people said they would choose plant-based options. This rose to 27% when they were told that the products tasted similar and were informed how they were made. Importantly, many participants didn’t believe the products would taste the same, even when told that they would.
Another global study found that when matched for PTC, 41% of people preferred plant-based meat. In this case, though, participants were given extra information about health and sustainability, so PTC alone may not have been enough.
We don’t know how well HDCEs translate to the real world and actual behavior. In one case, a hypothetical choice showed that 59% of people would choose plant-based products, when in reality only 36% did. So, it’s also important to look at real-life case studies. For example, Ikea’s plant-based hotdogs make up just 8% of its annual hotdog sales despite being PTC-comparable. Similarly, Burger King’s Impossible Burgers make up around 15% of sales, with conventional burgers remaining stable.
One useful case study comes from the introduction of Impossible Foods’ plant-based ground beef at a college cafeteria in California. Students could get burritos prepared with this product, with vegetables, or with meat, all for free. After ten weeks, 26% of burrito sales included the Impossible product, 7% vegetables, and 67% meat. These cases show that assumptions about PTC may not always play out in the real world.
A downside of studies like this is they don’t consider an alternative scenario where plant-based meats are not available. For example, the researchers note that Impossible products were used to replace the vegetable option, meaning that it cut into vegetable sales instead of meat sales. As a result, it’s possible that people already seeking meatless options purchased the Impossible meat while meat-eaters remained unaffected.
Overall, the authors feel that PTC is not enough on its own to make plant-based meats desirable and reduce the sale of animal products. They believe plant-based meat still has a role to play in advocacy — advocates just need better evidence for how to make them appealing. This might involve focusing energy on future consumers who are more attracted to plant-based meat because of changing social norms vs. existing consumers whose preferences are formed and unchangeable.
Advocates should be aware that price, taste, and convenience are important, but they may not be enough to shift the global food system away from animals. Advocates can also make a difference by supporting research into the adoption of plant-based meats that go beyond “PTC.”