I strongly believe in the price, taste, convenience hypothesis. If/when non-animal foods are cheaper and tastier, I expect the west to undergo a moral cascade where factory farming in a very short timespan will go from being common place to illegal. I know that in the animal welfare space, this view point is often considered naive, but I remain convinced its true.
My mother buys the expensive vegan mayonnaise because it’s much tastier than the regular mayonnaise. I still eat dairy and eggs because the vegan alternatives suck.
What I don’t understand is why vegan alternatives have proven so difficult to make cheap and tasty. Are there any good write ups on this?
Like when I go to a supermarket in Copenhagen, every seitan product will charge a significant markup over the raw cost of the ingredients (Amazon will sell you kilos of seitan flour at very little cost).
Do consumers have sufficiently inelastic preferences that a small market high-markup is the most profitable strategy? Is the final market too small for producers to reach economies of scale for seitan, or is it just difficult to bootstrap?
I would love to better understand what the demand curves look like for various categories of vegan products, as I really can’t wrap my mind around how the current equilibrium came about
I think that the evidence price-taste-convenience hypothesis is unfortunately fairly weak given available evidence, for what it is worth. This analysis and this analysis are, I think, the best write ups on this.
At least part of the explanation is that vegan meat products spend a lot on R&D to make it taste good. Maybe another part is that home-made seitan is hard to do well (if you mess it up, it comes out really spongy and hard to eat), which drives up the willingness to pay for well-made store-bought seitan. I don’t know if that’s a sufficient explanation, though.
Why are seitan products so expensive?
I strongly believe in the price, taste, convenience hypothesis. If/when non-animal foods are cheaper and tastier, I expect the west to undergo a moral cascade where factory farming in a very short timespan will go from being common place to illegal. I know that in the animal welfare space, this view point is often considered naive, but I remain convinced its true.
My mother buys the expensive vegan mayonnaise because it’s much tastier than the regular mayonnaise. I still eat dairy and eggs because the vegan alternatives suck.
What I don’t understand is why vegan alternatives have proven so difficult to make cheap and tasty. Are there any good write ups on this?
Like when I go to a supermarket in Copenhagen, every seitan product will charge a significant markup over the raw cost of the ingredients (Amazon will sell you kilos of seitan flour at very little cost).
Do consumers have sufficiently inelastic preferences that a small market high-markup is the most profitable strategy? Is the final market too small for producers to reach economies of scale for seitan, or is it just difficult to bootstrap?
I would love to better understand what the demand curves look like for various categories of vegan products, as I really can’t wrap my mind around how the current equilibrium came about
Some helpful thoughts on this are here.
I think that the evidence price-taste-convenience hypothesis is unfortunately fairly weak given available evidence, for what it is worth. This analysis and this analysis are, I think, the best write ups on this.
Bravo for an excellent length-to-utility ratio! This comment “punches above its weight.”
At least part of the explanation is that vegan meat products spend a lot on R&D to make it taste good. Maybe another part is that home-made seitan is hard to do well (if you mess it up, it comes out really spongy and hard to eat), which drives up the willingness to pay for well-made store-bought seitan. I don’t know if that’s a sufficient explanation, though.
My hot take is that vegan alternatives generally just don’t get to scale where the marginal unit cost is low.