In the past, I’ve discussed research we’ve conducted on consumer demand for emerging plant-based meat alternatives vs. traditional meat (e.g., see here or here). Today, I’m happy to link to a new, extensive study on the topic conducted with Glynn Tonsor and Ted Schroeder at Kansas State for the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board.
There are a lot of interesting results stemming from four different experiments and multiple questions asked, but I’ll hit just a few highlights. Firs, along a variety of dimensions, consumers’ perceptions of beef are favorable relative to consumers’ perceptions of plant-based alternatives. For example, here is one series of questions.
Second, if given a pair-wise choice between a beef burger and a Beyond Meat burger at the same price, roughly a quarter of consumers choose the Beyond Meat option. Interestingly, the choice wasn’t much affected by whether we provided nutrition facts panels, ingredient lists, or whether the beef burger was organic, as shown below.
Another experiment, framed in a foodservice environment, explored how choices for beef burgers were affected by a Beyond Meat alternative vs. a Chicken Wrap. Short story: Introducing a Beyond Meat alternative has about the same impact as introducing a Chicken Wrap.
Finally, we conducted some simulated shopping choices (in both food service and grocery framings) to estimate own- and cross-price elasticities of demand for plant-based alternatives and traditional meat options.
As it turns out this sort of analysis is quite timely. On February 2, Impossible announced a 20% price reduction. Here is our estimated demand elasticities for all consumers and segmented by people we classify as regular meat consumers vs. those wo do not regularly consume meat (those who classified their diet as vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian, or other).
As the table above shows, a 1% drop in Impossible Burger’s price would lead to a 0.14% reduction in purchases of Store-Brand ground beef at retail grocery (across all consumers). If we extrapolate that to a 20% decrease, that suggests the recently announced price change will lead to a a 2.8% decline in Store Brand ground beef.
This reduction comes almost entirely from consumers who are not regular meat eaters (cross-price elasticity of +0.26) vs regular meat consumers (cross-price elasticity of +0.05). In fact, within the regular meat consuming segment we would project the price drop in Impossible would result in nearly 3x the impact on Beyond Beef as Store Brand ground beef.
There is much, much more in the report. You can read the whole thing here.