founder & president of the Good Food Institute, a global network of nonprofit organizations, with roughly 200 full-time team members across affiliates in the U.S., India, Israel, Brazil, Singapore, and Europe (UK & EU).
GFI works on alternative protein policy, science, and corporate engagement—to accelerate the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity.
I’ve now read through all the comments, and I find the discussion super-useful, so thanks for prompting it, Jacob.
Here are five points from me—apologies in advance for the length here.
First: I think our main disagreement is over how important taste and price are to food choices.
We agree with your thesis (that strong-form PTC is not defensible), though we also agree with the multiple commenters who suggest that you’re arguing against a view that almost no one holds.
I’ll start my response by just reiterating our view that taste and price are critical to food choice, both generally (cite) and with regard to plant-based meat specifically (cite). That is, we don’t see a way to convince consumers to stop eating animal products unless we give them something that tastes at least as good and that is competitively priced.
Second: I don’t think you offer convincing evidence to the contrary.
In attempting to cast doubt on the importance of taste and price to food choice, you discuss: 1) ten discrete choice experiments; 2) three commercial case studies; and 3) the Malan 2022 field experiment. I think that the discrete choice experiments indicate the opposite of what you suggest, and so too the three commercial case studies and Malan field trial, once more information is added to the analysis.
The ten hypothetical discrete choice experiments (HDCE): In these experiments, consumers said they would prefer plant-based (or in a few cases cultivated) meat over conventional meat at rates of 11% 19%, 27%, 25%, 22%, 41%, 45%, 51%, 63%, and 66% percent. These displacement numbers strike me as quite remarkable for a product that does not exist, in a world where (as you rightly note), people really like meat. And we get these very impressive numbers even though consumers were dubious about the question’s premise (plant-based meat at taste parity); as you note, the one time the premise was tested, “only 8% of respondents believed all the burgers would taste the same.”
As an illustration of why there may be such variance: The 11% number comes from a Swedish study that called the comparator “plant-based meat-like burgers” that are “very meat-like” (“meat-like” is not the same as taste parity, and still 11% said they would switch). You note that another Swedish study found 45% - I’m guessing the framing was better on that one.
You conclude: “In summary, the results of HDCEs conflict with the hypothesis that consumers largely prefer PTC-competitive plant-based meats over animal-based meat.”
I’ve never seen anyone defend that hypothesis (that consumers largely prefer PTC-competitive plant-based meat over animal-based meat), but to me, these studies prove—rather than disprove—the importance of taste and price to consumer choice. There is no incentive for consumers to believe that plant-based meat will actually taste good (the one study that asked that question found that they don’t believe it) and no incentive for consumers to claim they’re excited about plant-based meat. And yet we still get extremely impressive hypothetical displacement numbers.
The three commercial case studies: You look at Ikea hot dogs, Umami’s launch of the Impossible Burger, and Burger King’s Impossible Whopper. Your assessment is that these case studies “suggest that most consumers do not prefer plant-based meats, even for relatively PTC-competitive products.”
I don’t know if the Ikea hot dog competes on taste, but here’s why I’m dubious: A recent (this year) Food System Innovations taste test of the most common plant-based hot dogs didn’t find anything that compared to conventional hot dogs (nothing even came close—consumers really disliked all the plant-based hot dogs). If none of the current commercial products come anywhere near competing on taste, I doubt the Ikea hot dog does (would be delighted to be wrong, obviously); I imagine it’s eaten by vegetarians, almost exclusively.
I don’t think the Burger King or Umami Burgers prove your point either: You describe the difference in price between the Whopper and Impossible Whopper as “slight,” but I disagree: When these results were compiled, the Impossible Whopper cost 43% more than the regular Whopper: $4.19 v $5.99. That’s a pretty massive premium for a fast food burger, it seems to me; regardless, it’s definitely not close to price parity. At my local BK, the current numbers are $5.69 v $6.69, so still at 17% premium.
You also don’t mention price w/r/t Umami, despite the fact that the sentence immediately following your discussion implies price parity. In fact, when that Umami survey was done, the Impossible burger cost 37% more ($7.99 v. $10.99). Today, it’s 16% more; you can still get a double burger or a deluxe burger for less and a truffle or bacon ranch burger for the same price. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to suggest that a product that costs 37% more has anything to say about how a product would do at price parity.
Far from contesting the PTC hypothesis, I’d suggest that sales of 15% (Burger King) and 20% (Umami) are pretty great. Regardless, nothing about these three examples appears (to me) to cast doubt on the importance of taste and price parity to maximum plant-based meat displacement.
The Malan 2022 field experiment: Of course, we agree that taste and price parity, without more, are not enough for the kind of displacement we’re aiming for. The products need to be familiar, consumers need education about the healthfulness of the products, the products will have to be heavily marketed, and so on—none of that has happened much (if at all) in the Malan study.
Most fundamentally, as Jack_S notes: “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.” That seems right: As MichaelStJules notes w/r/t the Malan study: “In the UCLA study, unfamiliarity was also one of the main reasons (39%) for not even trying the Impossible option (table 23 in Malan’s PhD thesis).” It was actually the top reason.
An important step that I think is missing from your analysis is looking at why consumers skipped the Impossible ground beef or only tried it once: In short, the students who only tried it once or didn’t try it at all (more than half didn’t try it at all) don’t think it competes on taste. BradWest notes that “Probably if you were to survey the steak burrito eaters, they would say they got it because it tastes better.”
Those data actually are in the paper, and that’s right: First, of people who tried but didn’t like the Impossible ground beef, with open ended responses, taste parity was the reason (taste and texture: 53%; preparation: 10%) (table 28). And of the people who didn’t even try Impossible, just 11% thought it would be delicious, corroborating BradWest’s intuition (even as 59% thought it would be healthy and 82% thought it would be good for the climate).
In short, I don’t think your interpretation of Malan, that it “demonstrates that only a small share of consumers might prefer PTC-competitive plant-based meat,” is correct. In my view, once key data from the study with regard to taste parity is provided, Malan strongly indicates the critical importance of taste w/r/t the success of plant-based meat.
Third: The animal, environmental, and global health communities have been trying to convince the world to eat less meat for at least 50 years, and meat consumption continues to rise.
The book that turned me vegan 36 years ago is now more than 50 years old (here). And in that time, even per capita meat consumption has skyrocketed, with no signs of letting up (cite). Even in the United States, the five highest years for per capita meat consumption are the most recent five (cite). We need a solution that can scale globally, and we have not heard of anything that seems likely to work, other than price and taste competitive alternative proteins.
We like the analogy to renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs): Renewables give consumers what they want w/r/t energy consumption, EVs give consumers what they want w/r/t personal transport, and alt proteins need to give consumers what they want from animal products. W/r/t animal products, if we can make something that is indistinguishable to consumers and that costs less, then over time (perhaps fairly quickly, especially with cultivated meat), we can replace the harmful products with products that cause far less harm (this is not all that’s required, but this is required).
While campaigns focused on energy efficiency, walkable cities and public transportation, and reduced meat consumption are valuable, we are unlikely to convince a majority of consumers almost anywhere (let alone globally) to consume less energy, drive less, or eat less meat. Just as we need to change how energy is produced and vehicles are powered, so too we need to change how animal products are made.
That said, of course we still need to do more—none of this happens magically. And that means:
touting the health benefits of plant based meat (e.g., here)
addressing concerns around the healthfulness and safety of cultivated meat (e.g., here)
contextualizing alt proteins alongside renewables and EVs in terms of need for government support (e.g., here and here and here)
thinking a lot about framing. For example, making clear that alt proteins support consumer choice and jobs in the heartland, stressing the economic value of these industries, and so on (see, e.g., this report that GFI & FSI sponsored from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, this paper we co-authored with the Breakthrough Institute, and our principal lobby leave-behind—the most prominent quote is from Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary).
While these and many other factors will determine how many consumers shift away from industrial animal products, none of these factors works without price and taste competitive products. To get there, we need a lot more science and a lot more government support, so that’s where we focus.
In the Sentient Media interview, the reporter indicates that your solution to skyrocketing meat demand is to “integrate natural plant-based foods — based on whole proteins like lentils, nuts and soy — into the larger food landscape.” Is that right? If so, I’m curious about your support for this strategy: Is this different in some way from what has been tried over the past fifty years (and then some), even as meat demand has skyrocketed? Is there some new angle of this strategy that you’re excited about? And how do you see that scaling?
TBC, I’m a huge fan of diet-focused advocacy—it’s similar to encouraging people to insulate their houses for energy efficiency (and passing tax incentives to make that more appealing), convincing cities to adopt “meatless Mondays,” campaigns on behalf of bike commuting, and so on—all of these things are great (we should do them!), but two key points: 1) if they work, they pay relatively small (compared to what’s needed) dividends in terms of decreased energy use, miles driven, and meat consumed—they will not reach large displacement numbers; and 2) they don’t scale: They have to be adopted and implemented over and over and over and over (city-by-city or, at beast, country-by-country).
But similarly to the theory of change of renewables and EVs, with alt proteins, if we can produce meat from plants and cultivation, this can just become how meat is made into the future (not implying it happens by magic, of course!). As with cost-competitive renewable energy, progress in one area of the world can scale globally (this is why GFI operates in Singapore and Israel—world class scientific institutions and governments that fund science).
In the Fall 2022 Foreign Policy article that you cite, which I co-authored with Climate Advisers’ founder & CEO Nigel Purvis, we offer four key suggestions for such a global shift—but I don’t think any of those work for any intervention other than alt proteins. I’d be interested in hearing more from you on this.
Fourth, I agree with Jackva that while of course meat is different from energy and cars, many of the differences work in favor of alt proteins, not against them.
Jackva notes that “from what we know from other transitions, we know that reaching a state close to PTC explains a lot of the variance in adoption so it seems reasonable as a best-guess prior that this will be the case for the animal protein transition as well,” and he offers a strong case for this thesis.
He also notes that while the analogy is not perfect, there are ways in which alt proteins will compare favorably w/r/t ease of replacement. For example, “alternative proteins are a better meat replacement than renewables are replacements for coal (no equivalent to intermittency), the food industry is smaller and less powerful than the energy industry, changing protein sourcing is easier than changes in the energy system that require more infrastructure, etc.”
There are many additional examples to support his point, but I’d like to just note two of them:
First, we have the two largest food companies and top six meat companies (and others) supporting and investing in alternative proteins—they don’t own the farms, and if they can make more money from plant-based and cultivated meat, why wouldn’t they? A few months ago, I was in Brazil, and the Rebel Whopper at Burger King is produced by Brazil’s second largest meat company (top 6 in the world) - and it’s quite good. Tyson Foods has a very good plant-based chicken nugget (available at Target stores nationwide). And on and on.
Second and perhaps just as crucial, I think there is strong evidence that many, many people eat meat despite how it’s produced, not because of it (I think the numbers in your hypothetical discrete choice experiment discussion are also a strong indication of this). As I discuss on the 80,000 Hours podcast, I do think that if we can make plant-based and cultivated meat that compete on price and taste, that will make the advocacy work a heck of a lot easier—but advocacy (or at least robust marketing) will still be required, as I think is clear from that podcast and everywhere else I’ve discussed this issue in any depth.
On this point (people eating meat despite and not because of how it’s produced), see here from the Sentience Institute: 47% of consumers claim that they want to ban factory farms, and 45% claim they want to ban slaughterhouses. The basics of this survey were validated by Oklahoma State agricultural researchers. Obviously consumers wouldn’t actually vote that way; my point is just that this shows a strong visceral antipathy to the way meat is produced today (see, e.g., pages 4-6 of the OSU report). I wonder if there have ever been figures like that for banning gas-powered cars or fossil fuels. Very strong environmentalists hate gas-powered vehicles and fossil fuels, but I’d be surprised if that was anywhere near 45-47% of the general public—in the U.S. or anywhere.
Finally fifth: I’m not sure about your current thesis (the “strong-form” version of PTC).
You define the thesis as: “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.” Or, as Sentient Media quoted you for their article about your paper: “‘It’s just assumed, oh, you know, if only we had an identical thing that was different in key ways, everyone would just switch over,’ says Peacock, ‘when psychologically, I just don’t think that’s well supported.’”
When Jack_S reframed PTC theory as “the idea that if we achieve PTC-parity, the market will automatically shift” and stated, “I don’t think anyone in the space holds this view strongly,” you replied, “I don’t agree that no one holds this view. I’d refer to three lines of evidence.” The second and third lines of evidence were perception-based; only the first line of evidence involved examples of what you consider to be support for the strong-form PTC theory.
In my opinion, these are very weak citations, and your inference based on them is not (I don’t think) tenable.
These are very weak citations, IMO: What you refer to as “the main source I cite” and call “pretty clear cut” is a podcast from April 2019 that is just 13 minutes long. It’s a general discussion of alt proteins and GFI—the host doesn’t ask about the strong form PTC theory, and it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to infer from my brief comments about the importance of taste and price that I think those are the only things that are important.
What you refer to as your “other two main citations” are the 80,000 Hours podcast that also doesn’t discuss the PTC thesis and a 2019 GFI request for scientists to submit proposals to our grants program.
In the 80,000 hours podcast from early 2018, I’m clear that lots and lots of people are basically addicted to animal meat: “no matter how good plant-based meat gets, our hypothesis is that there are a significant number of human beings who are going to want to eat real meat.” There’s also much in that interview that makes clear that I believe there will need to be marketing campaigns to take price and taste competitive products over the finish line and also that we’re going to need support from the major meat companies, and more.
The 2019 science RFP is no longer online, but as Jack_S notes, even just within the very short snippet you include, “even then it’s not exclusively PTC, they also refer to these proteins winning out on perceptions of health and sustainability, and requiring product diversity.”
In my opinion, if the strong form PTC thesis were widely held, you would be able to cite a position paper, article, blog, or something where the case is explicitly made (rather than two fairly old podcasts and a science RFP that’s no longer online). I suppose maybe citing a podcast could make sense, if the thesis were explicitly addressed. To indicate that it’s a widely held view, it seems to me that you’d want to be able to cite half a dozen either current (on line now) or at least fairly recent (not 4+ years old) and explicit examples.
I put this point last b/c I do think we have a disagreement that’s real, and I think you could pretty easily refocus your paper on real disagreements. Since I think most people reading your paper will be wondering what might decrease demand for industrial animal products, I could also imagine you spending at least a bit of time sharing what you think might decrease meat consumption.
Thanks again for writing the piece and your engagement on the forum—I appreciate your commitment to this kind of analysis and also to robust discussion.