Why should consumers eat plant-based meat?
When compared to conventional meat, plant-based options often come up short, at least in the eyes of consumers. Many do not enjoy them as much as traditional meat, with their taste and texture often being criticised.
Furthermore, they are frequently branded as ‘ultra-processed’, marking them out as unhealthy in the eyes of sceptics.
While conventional meat is not necessarily ‘healthier’ per se, in a market where consumers are fixated on both protein and clean-label, plant-based products often lose out.
With all these disadvantages, what do consumers have to gain from eating plant-based products?
Arguably, plant-based meat has the edge ethically. Its creation does not involve the killing of animals, for example. It is also more sustainable, lacking animal meat’s impact on the environment.
In a world where factory farming is widely reviled and climate change is one of the main threats to the human race, these are not advantages to be scoffed at. But for many consumers, they are not enough.
Morality is abstract – consumers want concrete benefits
Arguments around the ethics of eating certain foods are, for the majority of consumers, abstract.
If consumers were themselves holding a terrified cow or pig in their hands and were tasked with violently killing it, many would no doubt blanch at the idea. Yet when it’s out of sight and mind, the knowledge of an animal’s pain is only an idea, often no more than a bullet point in a well-crafted press release.
Likewise, climate change may feel real during a heatwave, when moving is uncomfortable and the air above the pavements is rippling. Or when forest fires or floods take people’s homes and livelihoods. But otherwise, for many consumers in cooler countries or those who haven’t lived through environmental disasters, it remains an abstraction, a promise for the future to be relegated to another day.
For good or ill, it is difficult to sell abstraction when the competitor is selling concrete benefits.
Meat is considered tastier, more protein-rich, richer in vitamins and minerals, and more ‘natural’ than plant-based by many consumers. These are all things that can directly benefit them, in the short or medium term.
Ethical and environmental considerations remain, for many, broadly in the realm of ideas.
Plant-based meat is a financial sacrifice
Price parity has yet to be decisively reached across the board, meaning that for many consumers, buying plant-based meat is a sacrifice.
The sector continues to struggle in this area. While the price gap has narrowed considerably since the plant-based boom in the early 2020s, alternatives are still, in many instances, more costly than meat.
With cost of living perhaps the single greatest concern for consumers across Europe, this does not bode well for the sector.
Much has been invested by the plant-based sector to close this gap. But while a gap remains, it will be a struggle to persuade consumers to take the necessary financial hit through ethical arguments alone, especially in the face of perceived inadequacies in health and taste.
Much of the sector is taking heed of consumer scepticism, with many major plant-based companies increasingly leaning into clean label and departing from meat mimicry.
But for products that still posit themselves as direct substitutes for meat, comparisons with the real thing will inevitably be made. As long as consumers still perceive plant-based meat as inferior in taste, health and affordability, ethical arguments alone will rarely work.
