Thanks for posting this. You mention the importance of studies on plant-based food branding, consumer preferences, etc. I’m curious if you have spoken to people in the plant-based food industry on how useful such studies (and which kind) would be to them.
Although I am not interested in pursuing an AARF grant, I do work with retail scanner data and am pursuing a few projects that I hope will be helpful for animals. One issue I run into is that while it is fairly straight forward to predict which sorts of questions will be of interest to journals, it is far from obvious which types of research questions would be of interest to plant-based food companies. I assume that many companies are hiring their own data analysts to explore pricing and coupon policies, so I imagine that additional contributions on this front might not be particularly useful. I also assume that they have a pretty good grasp on how demand shifts with their own pricing, and that is likely to drive their decision making (more so than, say, the effects of a reduced price for a plant-based item on its animal-derived analog). I’m not even sure if many companies are likely to engage with econ journal publications in any capacity. Of course there are other avenues by which such research might be helpful (policy, corporate advocacy, short term third party subsidizing, etc.), but I think of them as primarily for the benefit of industry.
If you happen to have any insight from the industry on this, I’d be very interested.
Note that I crosspost these on ACE’s behalf, so they may not see this comment. I’d recommend reaching out to them directly, since this seems like an excellent set of questions!
Thanks for posting this. You mention the importance of studies on plant-based food branding, consumer preferences, etc. I’m curious if you have spoken to people in the plant-based food industry on how useful such studies (and which kind) would be to them.
Although I am not interested in pursuing an AARF grant, I do work with retail scanner data and am pursuing a few projects that I hope will be helpful for animals. One issue I run into is that while it is fairly straight forward to predict which sorts of questions will be of interest to journals, it is far from obvious which types of research questions would be of interest to plant-based food companies. I assume that many companies are hiring their own data analysts to explore pricing and coupon policies, so I imagine that additional contributions on this front might not be particularly useful. I also assume that they have a pretty good grasp on how demand shifts with their own pricing, and that is likely to drive their decision making (more so than, say, the effects of a reduced price for a plant-based item on its animal-derived analog). I’m not even sure if many companies are likely to engage with econ journal publications in any capacity. Of course there are other avenues by which such research might be helpful (policy, corporate advocacy, short term third party subsidizing, etc.), but I think of them as primarily for the benefit of industry.
If you happen to have any insight from the industry on this, I’d be very interested.
Note that I crosspost these on ACE’s behalf, so they may not see this comment. I’d recommend reaching out to them directly, since this seems like an excellent set of questions!
Oh sorry didn’t realize that. Thanks!