Shoppers valued healthier, greener foods, but still chose meat

by · News-Medical

When shoppers weigh health, sustainability, and price against familiar meal choices, the balance between meat and its alternatives becomes more complicated than it first appears.

Paper: Preferences for Meat and Meat Alternatives in Different Meal Scenarios: A Dutch Discrete Choice Experiment. AI-generated abstract conceptual image created using ChatGPT/Open AI

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In a recent research article published in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition, researchers investigated Dutch adults' preferences for meat and meat alternatives across different meal scenarios. They found that meat remained the preferred option when other measured characteristics were equal, while health and sustainability labels ranked highly among participants' choices.

Diet Transition Need

Current dietary patterns in high-income nations, including the Netherlands, can harm both human and planetary health. Red meat, in particular, is one of the main contributors to unhealthy and unsustainable diets, with average meat consumption in the Netherlands higher than recommended guidelines.

The authors cite prior research showing that substituting or partially replacing meat with protein-rich plant-based foods, such as legumes and plant-based meat alternatives, can reduce the environmental impact of diets and improve health.

Yet the adoption of these alternatives remains marginal in Western societies, and meat consumption remains a social norm. The paper cites cooking skills, cultural factors, and familiarity as possible reasons for the low use of plant-based protein foods.

Understanding consumers' food-choice motives can help identify factors that accelerate or impede a shift in diet.

Discrete Choice Experiment Method

To examine those trade-offs, the researchers used a discrete choice experiment (DCE), a stated-preference method used to estimate preferences, trade-offs between product attributes, and willingness to pay.

The study engaged 272 Dutch participants, recruited through a consumer panel in January 2022 using quotas for age, sex, education, and geographical region. The final sample was broadly representative for age, sex, and region, but highly educated adults were overrepresented.

A key inclusion criterion for participation was that individuals must have consumed meat, meat replacers, and legumes within the three months prior to the study, so participants had some familiarity with all three product categories. This criterion excluded vegetarians, vegans, and people who had not recently eaten from one of the categories.

Participants were asked to choose the product they would be most likely to purchase in a supermarket, but the study measured hypothetical online choices rather than actual purchases. They were presented with two meal scenarios: a pasta meal and a traditional Dutch potatoes-meat-vegetables (PMV) meal. These contexts allowed the researchers to assess whether preferences for meat or its alternatives varied by meal type.

In each scenario, participants completed 10 choice tasks, each requiring them to select one option from "meat," "meat replacer," or "legumes." The attributes varied across tasks and covered nutritional, environmental, and production considerations.

These attributes included protein content, an overall health label, an overall environmental sustainability label, price, and indications of local and organic production. The health and environmental impact labels used a three-level traffic-light system of red, yellow, and green rather than a 1-to-5 scale.

Price varied across three levels. The design also restricted meat from receiving a green sustainability label and assigned legumes a green health label in every task to make the combinations more plausible.

The researchers analyzed the choices using a multinomial logit (MNL) model and latent class analysis (LCA) to identify the relative importance of each attribute and examine preference patterns among consumer subgroups.

Preference Findings & Implications

The findings showed that meat remained favored when the measured attributes were held equal, while health and sustainability labels still ranked highly in the choice models. In both the pasta and PMV scenarios, participants preferred meat over meat replacers and legumes when the listed attributes were held equal.

This indicates that meat remained favored after accounting for the attributes included in the experiment. In baseline questions, 77.9% of participants rated meat as the tastiest of the three categories. The authors discuss taste expectations, cultural meanings, and habitual consumption as possible influences, but taste expectations and habitual consumption were not included as attributes in the DCE, so the experiment does not show that they caused the preference.

Meat remained favored in both settings, but the pasta scenario showed greater potential for meat replacement than the traditional PMV meal. The authors reported only limited differences in willingness to pay and latent-class structure between the two scenarios, so the meal-context effect was modest in this experiment.

Health ranked first and sustainability second in both meal scenarios. Price ranked third in the pasta scenario and fourth in the PMV scenario, where organic production ranked third. Participants preferred options with better health and sustainability ratings and lower prices.

The pattern shows that participants placed greater value on products with better health and sustainability ratings, while meat remained favored after accounting for the measured attributes.

The latent class analysis also showed differences in consumer preferences. The model estimated that a class with particularly low willingness to pay for meat replacers and legumes represented 27% of participants in the pasta analysis and 30% in the PMV analysis. These were separate, scenario-specific classes, so the study does not establish that the same fixed 30% of participants formed a single resistant group across both meals.

Shifting Diet Strategies

This discrete choice experiment among Dutch adults shows that health, sustainability, and price ranked highly in the choice models, while most participants still favored meat over plant-based meat replacers and legumes when planning meals.

Strategies to support dietary transitions should not rely on information dissemination alone. The authors discuss affordability and pricing, clearer standardized sustainability information, sensory expectations, and household or social influences in relation to dietary change.

The study also has limits on how broadly these findings can be applied. The findings come from a hypothetical online experiment rather than observed purchases. Since the sample included only adults who had recently consumed all three food categories and was overrepresented by highly educated adults, the results should not be treated as representative of all Dutch consumers.

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