Thanks for this article, I agree with a lot of the takeaways, and I think that more research into developing an evidence-based theory of change for short- and long-term uptake of alt proteins is very valuable.
But I think the problem with arguing against an informal hypothesis is that I donāt think youāre actually arguing against a commonly-held view.
This is how you frame it:
āThe price, taste, and convenience (PTC) hypothesis posits that if plant-based meat is competitive with animal-based meat on these three criteria, the large majority of current consumers would replace animal-based meat with plant-based meat.ā
Iāll call it the āpositive-PTC hypothesisā, the idea that if we achieve PTC-parity, the market will automatically shift. I donāt think anyone in the space holds this view strongly. To the extent that they do stress PTC over other factors, the sources you quote seem to put more emphasis on the ānegative-PTCā hypothesis- achieving PTC-parity is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for people to start considering PBM.
Szejda et al. say:
āā¦ only after a food product is perceived as delicious, affordable, and accessible will the average consumer consider its health benefits, environmental impact, or impact on animals in the decision to purchase it.ā
This negative-PTC hypothesis also seems to be implied more to some extent in the Friedrich 80k podcast you refer to. He also says explicitly that he doesnāt think everyone would switch to PTC-matched PBM (hence the need for cell-cultured meat).
Thereās a bit of positive-PTC in the GFI research program RFP (2019) claim that āalternative proteins become the default choiceā (both cultured and PBM), but even then itās not exclusively PTC, they also refer to these proteins winning out on perceptions of health and sustainability, and requiring product diversity.
As well as this, every source you quote, and every paper Iāve ever read on PB meat acceptance, also stresses a bunch of other factors besides PTC. In particular, the main report you associate with PTC (Szejda et al. 2020) stresses familiarity throughout the report. āWhile many people have favorable attitudes toward sustainability and animals, the core-driver barriers to acting on these attitudes are too strong for most. More than anything, products that meet taste, price, convenience, and familiarity expectations will reduce these barriersā. Familiarity in itself could go a long way to explaining the negative results in all the studies you refer to: all are comparing an unfamiliar product with a familiar product.
So Iād argue that very few people in this space actually support the PTC hypothesis as you frame it. Few people think that PTC-parity is sufficient for widespread PBM uptake.
Having said that, I think there probably is an interesting, genuine divergence of views with people who hold a PTC+ hypothesis and those who hold a more āholisticā view. So if a diverse range of alt proteins achieve parity in price, taste and convenience, while also being positively perceived in terms of familiarity, health, environment, status, safety etc., some might believe that there will be an inevitable shift to these products, while others would think that meat and carnism is so embedded within our cultural and social norms that even if we get overwhelming good alternatives, the majority of the population would still be very unlikely to stop eating meat. Itās an interesting question, but one that I donāt think youāve answered in this piece.
Iām not sure about the academic literature, but will add anecdotally that my impression is that the PTC hypothesis is extremely widespread within the advocacy spaceāpeople talk about it a ton.
Iāll also add that the ānecessary but not sufficientā line feels hard to interpret without more clarification (and a bit meaningless on its own because of this). It would be helpful if people pushing this position could clarify how much of the effort PTC is doing to reach sufficiency. E.g. if one thinks that if we reach PTC parity, and its done like 90% of the work to cause widespread adoption, I think theyāre basically agreeing with the positive-PTC hypothesis. But, if PTC parity is required, but is like, 5% of whatās needed, thatās a very different claim.
Finally, the podcast referenced is very much positive-PTC. It feels really misleading to me to claim that podcast is negative-PTC. To the extent it isnāt, itās strongly in the āPTC is doing 90%+ of the workā direction. E.g., to quote it directly:
...I was on the panel at a Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco maybe six or eight months ago with Mary Kay James who runs Tyson New Ventures with Tyson Venture Capital Fund and she said, āWe are absolutely looking at clean meat,ā which she called it clean meat, āas one of the things that we want to invest in.ā And she said, āFor us, itās all about choice. We will provide the meat that consumers want.ā Well, price, taste, convenience. When clean meat is price and taste competitive, Tyson, Perdue, Hormel, everybody just moves in that direction.
...
when weāre thinking about what it is that we want to eat, every single one of us thinks about the price of the food, we think about how itās going to taste. We may not be thinking about convenience but convenience is going to be a central factor. If itās not there, weāre not going to consume it.
...
The main thing that The Good Food Institute works on, when we say alternatives to the products of conventional animal agriculture, basically what weāre looking for is products that will compete on the basis of price, taste, and convenience as I mentioned.
I agree, especially with your points on ānecessary but not sufficient.ā In my view, this represents mostly a pivot from the PTC hypothesis. Iām not sure whether to view this as post hoc hypothesizing (generally bad) or merely updating-on-evidence (generally good).
I do think the question of āwhat percent of the āworkā is PTC?ā is probably not well-defined, but is likely a worthwhile starting point for disagreement.
Thanks for both of your responses (@Jacob_Peacock and @abrahamrowe). I was going to analyse the podcast in more detail to resolve our different understandings, but I think @BruceF ās response to the piece clarifies his views on the ānegative/āpositiveā PTC hypothesis. The views that he would defend are: (negative) āFirst, if we donāt compete on price and taste, the products will stay niche, and meat consumption will continue to grow.ā and (positive) āSecond, if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot, even if other factors will need to be met to gain additional market share.ā
I expect that these two claims are less controversial, albeit with āquite a lotā leaving some ambiguity.
My initial response was based on my assumption that everyone involved in alt protein realises that PTC-parity is only one step towards widespread adoption. But I agree that itās worth getting more specific and checking how people feel about Abrahamās āhow much of the work is PTC doing- 90% vs 5%?ā question.
I assume if you surveyed/ā interviewed people working in the space, there would be a fairly wide range of views. I doubt if people have super-clear models, because weāre expecting progress in the coming years to come on multiple fronts (consumer acceptance, product quality, product suitability, policy, norms), and to mutually reinforce each other, but it would be worth clarifying so that you can better identify what youāre arguing against.
From my own work on alt-protein adoption in Asia I sense that PTC-parity is only a small part of the puzzle, but it would also be far easier to solve the other pieces if we suddenly had some PTC-competitive killer products, so PTC interact with other variables in ways that make it difficult to calculate.
Overall, I stand by my criticism that I donāt think the positive PTC-hypothesis as you frame it is commonly held. But Iād like to understand better what the views are that youāre critiquing. It would be interesting to see your anecdotal evidence supported- what people actually think when they say they (previously) bought into PTC, and who these people are. It could be true, for example, that people who work in PBM startups tend to believe more strongly that a PTC-competitive product will transform the market, but people working on the market side tend to realise how many barriers there are to adoption beyond these factors.
Thanks! My subsequent reply to Bruce might be helpful hereāwhile Bruce doesnāt defend the claim here, I do think he says things that strongly resemble it elsewhere.
Hi Jack, thanks for your comment and so thoroughly checking my sources!
I agree with your interpretation of Szejda. I intended to cite this study with regards to the PTC premiseāthat PTC primarily determine food choiceānot the PTC hypothesis in full (that PTC-competitive PBM would largely displace animal-based meat).
However, I donāt agree that no one holds this view. Iād refer to three lines of evidence:
Direct textual evidence. In particular, I think the main source I cite is pretty clear cut:
the hypothesis proposes that plant-based meat ācan compete on the basis of price, taste, and convenience, and just remove animals from the equation altogetherā (Anderson, 2019).
I also donāt quite see your points played out in the other two main sources I cite. That said, it has been a while since I read them cover-to-cover, so if there are passages you think conflict with those I cited, Iād welcome them :) Here are the other two main citations.
When weāre thinking about what it is that we want to eat, every single one of us thinks about the price of the food, we think about how itās going to taste. We may not be thinking about convenience but convenience is going to be a central factor. [...] We want to actually create plant-based alternatives and clean meat alternatives to conventional animal agriculture that compete on the basis of those factors and shift the world away from industrialized animal agricultureā(Cargill & Wiblin, 2018).
Despite rising awareness of the global impacts of our dietary choices, consumers continue to base their purchasing decisions primarily on price, taste, and convenience. Quite simply, reducing animal protein consumption is intractable for most people due to a lack of appetizing and affordable products that could serve as alternatives to conventional animal protein products. The challenge, then, is to innovate and bring to market diverse protein alternatives that are as delicious, price-competitive, and convenient as animal-derived food products are currently. By making healthy and sustainable alternative proteins comparable to conventional proteins in the areas of flavor, price, and ubiquity, alternative proteins become the default choiceā (GFI Research Program, 2019, pp. 4ā5).
āOther researchers offer similar descriptions of the PTC hypothesis (Anthis, 2018; Kankyoku, 2022).ā So thereās at least a perception among other researchers as well that some people hold these views.
My anecdotal experience since publishing the paper. Iāve received comments from both people who ~believed the PTC hypothesis and from people who agree the view is prevalent. Similarly, see other posts in this thread agreeing that this view is widespread. (Noting that Abraham Rowe and I both work at Rethink Priorities.)
Thanks for this article, I agree with a lot of the takeaways, and I think that more research into developing an evidence-based theory of change for short- and long-term uptake of alt proteins is very valuable.
But I think the problem with arguing against an informal hypothesis is that I donāt think youāre actually arguing against a commonly-held view.
This is how you frame it:
āThe price, taste, and convenience (PTC) hypothesis posits that if plant-based meat is competitive with animal-based meat on these three criteria, the large majority of current consumers would replace animal-based meat with plant-based meat.ā
Iāll call it the āpositive-PTC hypothesisā, the idea that if we achieve PTC-parity, the market will automatically shift. I donāt think anyone in the space holds this view strongly. To the extent that they do stress PTC over other factors, the sources you quote seem to put more emphasis on the ānegative-PTCā hypothesis- achieving PTC-parity is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for people to start considering PBM.
Szejda et al. say:
āā¦ only after a food product is perceived as delicious, affordable, and accessible will the average consumer consider its health benefits, environmental impact, or impact on animals in the decision to purchase it.ā
This negative-PTC hypothesis also seems to be implied
moreto some extent in the Friedrich 80k podcast you refer to. He also says explicitly that he doesnāt think everyone would switch to PTC-matched PBM (hence the need for cell-cultured meat).Thereās a bit of positive-PTC in the GFI research program RFP (2019) claim that āalternative proteins become the default choiceā (both cultured and PBM), but even then itās not exclusively PTC, they also refer to these proteins winning out on perceptions of health and sustainability, and requiring product diversity.
As well as this, every source you quote, and every paper Iāve ever read on PB meat acceptance, also stresses a bunch of other factors besides PTC. In particular, the main report you associate with PTC (Szejda et al. 2020) stresses familiarity throughout the report. āWhile many people have favorable attitudes toward sustainability and animals, the core-driver barriers to acting on these attitudes are too strong for most. More than anything, products that meet taste, price, convenience, and familiarity expectations will reduce these barriersā. Familiarity in itself could go a long way to explaining the negative results in all the studies you refer to: all are comparing an unfamiliar product with a familiar product.
So Iād argue that very few people in this space actually support the PTC hypothesis as you frame it. Few people think that PTC-parity is sufficient for widespread PBM uptake.
Having said that, I think there probably is an interesting, genuine divergence of views with people who hold a PTC+ hypothesis and those who hold a more āholisticā view. So if a diverse range of alt proteins achieve parity in price, taste and convenience, while also being positively perceived in terms of familiarity, health, environment, status, safety etc., some might believe that there will be an inevitable shift to these products, while others would think that meat and carnism is so embedded within our cultural and social norms that even if we get overwhelming good alternatives, the majority of the population would still be very unlikely to stop eating meat. Itās an interesting question, but one that I donāt think youāve answered in this piece.
Iām not sure about the academic literature, but will add anecdotally that my impression is that the PTC hypothesis is extremely widespread within the advocacy spaceāpeople talk about it a ton.
Iāll also add that the ānecessary but not sufficientā line feels hard to interpret without more clarification (and a bit meaningless on its own because of this). It would be helpful if people pushing this position could clarify how much of the effort PTC is doing to reach sufficiency. E.g. if one thinks that if we reach PTC parity, and its done like 90% of the work to cause widespread adoption, I think theyāre basically agreeing with the positive-PTC hypothesis. But, if PTC parity is required, but is like, 5% of whatās needed, thatās a very different claim.
Finally, the podcast referenced is very much positive-PTC. It feels really misleading to me to claim that podcast is negative-PTC. To the extent it isnāt, itās strongly in the āPTC is doing 90%+ of the workā direction. E.g., to quote it directly:
(Abraham and I both work for Rethink Priorities.)
I agree, especially with your points on ānecessary but not sufficient.ā In my view, this represents mostly a pivot from the PTC hypothesis. Iām not sure whether to view this as post hoc hypothesizing (generally bad) or merely updating-on-evidence (generally good).
I do think the question of āwhat percent of the āworkā is PTC?ā is probably not well-defined, but is likely a worthwhile starting point for disagreement.
Thanks for both of your responses (@Jacob_Peacock and @abrahamrowe). I was going to analyse the podcast in more detail to resolve our different understandings, but I think @BruceF ās response to the piece clarifies his views on the ānegative/āpositiveā PTC hypothesis. The views that he would defend are: (negative) āFirst, if we donāt compete on price and taste, the products will stay niche, and meat consumption will continue to grow.ā and (positive) āSecond, if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot, even if other factors will need to be met to gain additional market share.ā
I expect that these two claims are less controversial, albeit with āquite a lotā leaving some ambiguity.
My initial response was based on my assumption that everyone involved in alt protein realises that PTC-parity is only one step towards widespread adoption. But I agree that itās worth getting more specific and checking how people feel about Abrahamās āhow much of the work is PTC doing- 90% vs 5%?ā question.
I assume if you surveyed/ā interviewed people working in the space, there would be a fairly wide range of views. I doubt if people have super-clear models, because weāre expecting progress in the coming years to come on multiple fronts (consumer acceptance, product quality, product suitability, policy, norms), and to mutually reinforce each other, but it would be worth clarifying so that you can better identify what youāre arguing against.
From my own work on alt-protein adoption in Asia I sense that PTC-parity is only a small part of the puzzle, but it would also be far easier to solve the other pieces if we suddenly had some PTC-competitive killer products, so PTC interact with other variables in ways that make it difficult to calculate.
Overall, I stand by my criticism that I donāt think the positive PTC-hypothesis as you frame it is commonly held. But Iād like to understand better what the views are that youāre critiquing. It would be interesting to see your anecdotal evidence supported- what people actually think when they say they (previously) bought into PTC, and who these people are. It could be true, for example, that people who work in PBM startups tend to believe more strongly that a PTC-competitive product will transform the market, but people working on the market side tend to realise how many barriers there are to adoption beyond these factors.
Thanks! My subsequent reply to Bruce might be helpful hereāwhile Bruce doesnāt defend the claim here, I do think he says things that strongly resemble it elsewhere.
Hi Jack, thanks for your comment and so thoroughly checking my sources!
I agree with your interpretation of Szejda. I intended to cite this study with regards to the PTC premiseāthat PTC primarily determine food choiceānot the PTC hypothesis in full (that PTC-competitive PBM would largely displace animal-based meat).
However, I donāt agree that no one holds this view. Iād refer to three lines of evidence:
Direct textual evidence. In particular, I think the main source I cite is pretty clear cut:
I also donāt quite see your points played out in the other two main sources I cite. That said, it has been a while since I read them cover-to-cover, so if there are passages you think conflict with those I cited, Iād welcome them :) Here are the other two main citations.
āOther researchers offer similar descriptions of the PTC hypothesis (Anthis, 2018; Kankyoku, 2022).ā So thereās at least a perception among other researchers as well that some people hold these views.
My anecdotal experience since publishing the paper. Iāve received comments from both people who ~believed the PTC hypothesis and from people who agree the view is prevalent. Similarly, see other posts in this thread agreeing that this view is widespread. (Noting that Abraham Rowe and I both work at Rethink Priorities.)