Thank you for this write-up! It sounds really intriguing. The calculation is a bit beyond my area of expertise, but here are some more general reflections:
If this is done through a fully vegan meal-kit service, it might be useful to also offer it as a long-term paid subscription option. For example, offering the first month for free and subsequent months at low/self-cost.
This may increase retention by making it more convenient for people to keep on using the meal kit service, automatically getting vegan meals afterward.
This would render the first month a form of philanthropy-funded advertisement for the meal kit service, giving it a great market edge over non-vegan competitors.
This might also enable more scale, pushing down per-unit costs.
A lot of people, including myself, are very averse to paid subscriptions. But I think that a full month’s food budget is a big enough bait to overcome this.
I would be interested in gifting this type of free initial month to friends and family. Sometimes I’ve given away vegan cookbooks in the hope that this would make people more comfortable making vegan meals, both for themselves and for me when visiting, and this could have a similar function.
Importantly, to me, this would not trade against my donation budget, but against my gift budget, reducing the opportunity cost massively.
If this is given as a Christmas gift for someone’s January food budget, there would be an obvious opportunity to pair up with Veganuary.
There may be a good opportunity to bundle meal kits with information campaigns, e.g., using the back side of the recipe to mention some fun (or not so fun) fact of the day, thereby increasing motivation.
Since people will already be prompted to think about their food choices, it might give them more food for thought (sorry). Anecdotally, for me personally, I remember taking a much bigger interest in these questions just after transitioning to a vegan diet, likely due to decreasing cognitive dissonance, making me much more receptive to the information.
Moreover, since the service is already gathering data on retention, this also creates a great opportunity for RCTs to test which form of information is most useful.
For interpretation of the results, I wonder if you could also mention what ranges of SADs/$ other promising interventions have. Is 19 a lot or a little, compared to our best options?
Thank you again for your work on this, and best of luck with it! I hope to be able to gift a subscription soon!
Somehow I didn’t even realise there were fully-vegan services, thanks for pointing it out! There’s definitely some good benefits to it, slight downside is that my initial scan puts them as ~1.5x base cost of Gousto, so there’s a tradeoff there. I will consider this more.
The gift option might be cool even independently of this sort of trial, esp. with Christmas gift for Veganuary, as you mention.
Very good idea on the info campaign, and the further study. Would definitely require a closer collaboration with the kit service, for them to monitor which boxes are for which trial participants, this might be another point in favour of choosing a fully-vegan service.
For the final point, I’ve added comparisons to the ‘Cost-Effectiveness Estimates’ section. The midpoint of 19 SAD/$ is below these estimates, but the optimistic case of 49 SAD/$ is comparable with some of them.
I notice that your assessments make the intervention on par with “Securing Scale-up Funding for Alternative Proteins”, which passed the bar for being recommended for AIM, which is encouraging. Given the uncertainty in the estimates, there seems to be significant Information Value from trying this at a smaller scale, and seeing what the data says.
At ~£4-6K it doesn’t seem impossible to find a small-grant funder supporting it. Some ideas for alternative or additional funding sources include:
If you partner with an existing meal-kit service, they may be interested in co-financing the experiment, since it, as previously mentioned, basically provides them with free advertisements.
You could also ask people to refer participants in exchange for some co-payment, e.g. 25%. This would enable people to get their friends a month of food at a 75% discount, while also filtering for people who are a bit more invested and likely to be aligned.
Again, Veganuary might be helpful in finding funding sources or in marketing the project to find suitable referrals.
Faunalytics may be interested in helping with study design and implementation, and potentially helping find funding sources.
Since AIM recommended comparable interventions, they may be interested in helping or advising on this project.
Just getting in contact with these various organizations to bounce the idea would also give you an opportunity for additional feedback!
Thank you for this write-up! It sounds really intriguing. The calculation is a bit beyond my area of expertise, but here are some more general reflections:
If this is done through a fully vegan meal-kit service, it might be useful to also offer it as a long-term paid subscription option. For example, offering the first month for free and subsequent months at low/self-cost.
This may increase retention by making it more convenient for people to keep on using the meal kit service, automatically getting vegan meals afterward.
This would render the first month a form of philanthropy-funded advertisement for the meal kit service, giving it a great market edge over non-vegan competitors.
This might also enable more scale, pushing down per-unit costs.
A lot of people, including myself, are very averse to paid subscriptions. But I think that a full month’s food budget is a big enough bait to overcome this.
I would be interested in gifting this type of free initial month to friends and family. Sometimes I’ve given away vegan cookbooks in the hope that this would make people more comfortable making vegan meals, both for themselves and for me when visiting, and this could have a similar function.
Importantly, to me, this would not trade against my donation budget, but against my gift budget, reducing the opportunity cost massively.
If this is given as a Christmas gift for someone’s January food budget, there would be an obvious opportunity to pair up with Veganuary.
There may be a good opportunity to bundle meal kits with information campaigns, e.g., using the back side of the recipe to mention some fun (or not so fun) fact of the day, thereby increasing motivation.
Since people will already be prompted to think about their food choices, it might give them more food for thought (sorry). Anecdotally, for me personally, I remember taking a much bigger interest in these questions just after transitioning to a vegan diet, likely due to decreasing cognitive dissonance, making me much more receptive to the information.
Moreover, since the service is already gathering data on retention, this also creates a great opportunity for RCTs to test which form of information is most useful.
For interpretation of the results, I wonder if you could also mention what ranges of SADs/$ other promising interventions have. Is 19 a lot or a little, compared to our best options?
Thank you again for your work on this, and best of luck with it! I hope to be able to gift a subscription soon!
Thanks for engaging!
Somehow I didn’t even realise there were fully-vegan services, thanks for pointing it out! There’s definitely some good benefits to it, slight downside is that my initial scan puts them as ~1.5x base cost of Gousto, so there’s a tradeoff there. I will consider this more.
The gift option might be cool even independently of this sort of trial, esp. with Christmas gift for Veganuary, as you mention.
Very good idea on the info campaign, and the further study. Would definitely require a closer collaboration with the kit service, for them to monitor which boxes are for which trial participants, this might be another point in favour of choosing a fully-vegan service.
For the final point, I’ve added comparisons to the ‘Cost-Effectiveness Estimates’ section. The midpoint of 19 SAD/$ is below these estimates, but the optimistic case of 49 SAD/$ is comparable with some of them.
Thanks, the comparisons are very helpful.
I notice that your assessments make the intervention on par with “Securing Scale-up Funding for Alternative Proteins”, which passed the bar for being recommended for AIM, which is encouraging. Given the uncertainty in the estimates, there seems to be significant Information Value from trying this at a smaller scale, and seeing what the data says.
At ~£4-6K it doesn’t seem impossible to find a small-grant funder supporting it. Some ideas for alternative or additional funding sources include:
If you partner with an existing meal-kit service, they may be interested in co-financing the experiment, since it, as previously mentioned, basically provides them with free advertisements.
You could also ask people to refer participants in exchange for some co-payment, e.g. 25%. This would enable people to get their friends a month of food at a 75% discount, while also filtering for people who are a bit more invested and likely to be aligned.
Again, Veganuary might be helpful in finding funding sources or in marketing the project to find suitable referrals.
Faunalytics may be interested in helping with study design and implementation, and potentially helping find funding sources.
Since AIM recommended comparable interventions, they may be interested in helping or advising on this project.
Just getting in contact with these various organizations to bounce the idea would also give you an opportunity for additional feedback!
Best of luck!