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Research Reports on Soy-based Food Demand

With the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) at Purdue, we’ve been working on a project funded by the United Soybean Board and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research to explore the impacts of various investment alternatives on soy farmer profitability. To undertake the economic modeling, we need to understand consumer demand for a variety of soy-based foods, and the extent to which consumers are willing to substitute between soy-based foods and other products.

We’ve now released three short research reports on consumer demand for:

There is a lot of interesting material in each report. For example, here are a couple graphs showing trends in the milk and milk-alternative markets. The big story here is the rise of oat milk, which has cut into sales of other milk-alternatives.

Another interesting finding from the meat and meat-alternatives paper that is consistent with prior research is the low degree of substitutability between conventional meats and the new meat alternatives. In fact, the estimates suggest chicken is a weak complement with (rather than a substitute to) meat alternatives.

Some Career News

I’m excited to announce that I will serve as the next Vice President and Dean of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, beginning early August.

It has been an honor and privilege to serve as the head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University, and I will miss my friends and colleagues in West Lafayette. Now it’s time for a new challenge.

There are many exciting things happening at Oklahoma State University, including the near completion of the New Frontiers campaign and building, a new University strategic plan that has clear emphasis on agriculture and the Land Grant mission, and the opportunity to work with the faculty and staff to identify some key strategic opportunities to raise the impact of the Division.

I can’t promise a lot of blog output in the coming months, but I will be looking for opportunities to highlight the excellent work at Oklahoma State and to ensure the Division is actively engaged in important conversations around food, agriculture, environment, and natural resources.

Consumer Food Insights - May 2023

The May 2023 edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out.

A few highlights:

  • Consumer food spending is at its highest level since our survey began in January 2022.

  • Food insecurity ticked up to 16%.

  • There has been a decline in the length of time individuals report being on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (conditional on being in the program)

  • Some good news: we continue to see a steady decline in the share of consumers who report not being able to find items they wish to buy at the grocery store. That is, reported stock-out rates are declining.

  • We compared the spending and buying behavior of households who spend more vs. less on food on a per-person basis.

There’s a lot more in the report.

Alternative Protein Sources: Balancing Food Innovation, Sustainability, Nutrition, and Health

That’s the title of a new publication from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine summarizing the outcomes from a workshop on alternative proteins. I served on the planning committee and gave a talk about the market prospects for alternative proteins.

The report (pages 23-30) summarizes my talk. Here are a couple excerpts from my portion:

“Jayson Lusk, Purdue University, explored the socioeconomic impacts of increasing the intake of alternative proteins. He began with an overview of the economics of protein production in the United States, including agricultural land use, the current agricultural economy, farmers’ attitudes toward various protein sources, consumer purchasing habits and preferences, and market trends for alternative proteins. He explained that most dietary protein consumed in the United States is derived from animal sources, with poultry and meat as the top sources, followed by bread products, milk, cheese, eggs, plant-based protein foods, and seafood (Pasiakos et al., 2015). When the data are aggregated by animal, dairy, or plant-based sources, more than 80 percent of U.S. protein consumption comes from animal and dairy foods (Phillips et al., 2015). Lusk noted that protein quality varies, and statistics based solely on grams of protein consumed do not account for quality. ”

and

“Sales of plant-based meat alternatives constitute some level of substitution for animal proteins, as well as an expansion of the protein market, Lusk explained. Using an economic model that links retail consumption to cattle production, he examined how a shift in demand toward plant-based
meat alternatives—namely those created by processing a combination of ingredients such as soy, wheat, and pea, with novel additive ingredients such as heme (as opposed to less processed products such as tofu and tempeh)—could affect meat production (Lusk et al., 2022). Currently, he reported, these effects are fairly small. As an example, he observed that a 10 percent decrease in the price of plant-based meat alternatives is projected to create only a 0.15 percent decline in the number of cattle raised in the United States. As contributing factors he pointed to the small size of existing estimates across price elasticities of demand and the relatively inelastic nature of the U.S. cattle supply, which does not directly compete for land use with other forms of agriculture. ”

There is a lot more in the report, which summarizes a wide range of perspectives on alternative proteins.

Consumer Food Insights - April 2023

The latest edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out. They report conveys the results of the survey conducted in the latter part of April 2023. Here are some of the main findings.

  • 55% of consumers shopped at a dollar store in the past 30 days

    • Most commonly (30%+) bought snack foods, candy, beverages

    • About 25% did not purchase food

    • Consumers tend to live closer to a dollar store than they do to the place they do most of their grocery shopping

    • About half of consumers said they’d be more likely to shop at a dollar store if it had a more full service grocery section that sold, e.g., fresh fruits and veggies

  • This month, we asked how often people purchased different types of organic foods (see the figure above).  The most commonly bout organic food items were organic vegetables and organic fruits, but even for this just over 30% said they often or always bought organic.  The least common categories for organic purchase was pasta, rice, and cereal, bread, and canned goods; for these almost 60% said they never or rarely buy organic.

  • In terms of our regular tracking questions, we find the following.

    • Total food spending is up 7% year over year

    • Consumers report lower rates of food price increases than they have in previous months.

    • Virtually no change in food insecurity.

  • We decomposed many of our survey results by people that were high, low, or very low in terms of food insecurity status. Compared to food secure households, households experiencing food insecurity …

    • had lower sustainable food purchase scores,

    • placed more weight on affordability when buying food,

    • were much more likely to be on SNAP and wait to buy groceries or eat out until their next paycheck,

    • were less likely to be happy with their diets and overall lives (although they remained fairly happy overall), and

    • less likely to trust food-related information from FDA and USDA.