That’s the title of a new co-authored paper led by Purdue PhD student, Zack Neuhofer, that was just published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. While there have been many survey efforts to understand consumer buying behavior related to plant-based meat alternatives, fewer studies have used actual purchase behaviors. Here’s the abstract:
“The promise of novel plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) to lessen the health and environmental impacts of meat consumption ultimately depend on market acceptance and the extent to which they displace meat in consumers’ diets. We use household scanner data to provide an in-depth analysis of consumers’ PBMA buying behaviors. PBMAs buyers tend to be young, single, female, college educated, employed, higher income, and non-white. About 20% of consumers purchased a PBMA at least once, and 12% purchased a PBMA on multiple occasions. About 2.79% of households only purchased PBMAs. About 86% of PBMA buyers also bought ground meat; however, PBMA buyers spent about 13% less on ground meat. Interestingly, after a household’s first PBMA purchase, ground meat consumption did not fall. The number of households buying a PBMA for the first time fell over the two year period studied, despite the increase in market share in the ground meat market.”
We summarize some of the results in this venn diagram.
You can read the whole thing here.
P.S. This paper largely provides a descriptive analysis of buying behavior; Zack is currently working on another paper that will include formal demand modeling.