People say plant-based burgers and nuggets taste just as good as the real thing. So why aren’t they buying them?

Last month, a food research organization called Nectar released an expansive set of findings from taste tests that rated plant-based meat alternatives alongside actual meat. One bit of information stood out: In terms of taste, 54% of people on average found 20 vegan products (such as burgers, nuggets, and sausages) from 13 brands (including Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Gardein) to taste as good as or better than analogous conventional meat products. This should probably be good news for those of us who are concerned about the environment, public health, and animal welfare. 

But the flipside of this discovery is that even though plant-based meat is starting to taste just as good as (and in some cases better than) animal meat, most people aren’t changing their purchasing habits accordingly. If “taste is king,” it doesn’t deserve the crown—and ignoring this reality will doom alt protein to irrelevance.

For many decades now, people in a whole array of fields have been on a mad mission to figure out how to get people to eat less meat. It has long been clear that education alone about the problems with factory farming isn’t enough to get people to change their behavior. Certainly shaming people, demanding total lifestyle overhaul, and expecting perfection are tactics that don’t work—that’s why I cofounded the Reducetarian Foundation, because encouraging incremental change actually does work. But even that has its limits.

Indeed, I have always believed that a more pragmatic approach—offering people better options in the marketplace—is ultimately one of the most effective ways to drive change. Specifically, I figured that the pillars of price, convenience, and especially taste were a sort of holy grail for the alt-meat industry. We can’t reasonably expect people to change their eating habits unless and until the more ethical, environmentally friendly, and healthy option is also the more affordable, convenient, and delicious choice.

Interestingly, we’ve reached a point where, at least in the case of some products, plant-based meat is indeed as tasty as (or, to some people, even tastier than) real meat. Prices are nearing parity (though aren’t quite there yet) and in some cases are even cheaper than animal meat. And plant-based meat is easier than ever to find, with major brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat stocked in mainstream supermarkets and fast food chains like Burger King and Starbucks offering alt-meat options. Plant-based meat may not have totally surpassed regular meat in the price-taste-convenience (PTC) trifecta, but compelling data shows that we’re closer than ever.

And yet, we’ve yet to see a real revolution in consumer habits. Plant-based meat still only makes up about 1% of total retail meat sales. We’re still a nation of meat eaters, eating more than 225 pounds of meat per year (and climbing), making us one the biggest meat-eating nations in the world. Suffice it to say, the scales aren’t tipping—at least not to the degree we’d expect to see if the so-called “PTC hypothesis” were wholly true. 

It turns out that in 2023, researcher Jacob Peacock, of the think tank Rethink Priorities, actually put the PTC hypothesis to the test, reviewing existing research on plant-based meat and consumer behavior. His conclusion? PTC doesn’t explain people’s choices. At least, not as comprehensively as some of us believed it would.

Peacock explains some major problems with collecting good data on consumer choices—like not enough real-world research, unreliable self-reports, and missing control groups. He also reviews many studies showing that people still prefer animal meat over plant-based meat, even when price and convenience aren’t issues and they say the taste is similar. Even in hypothetical situations, people tend to report that they’d still prefer real meal to alt-meat, regardless if it’s indistinguishable in terms of price, taste, and convenience. 

One of Peacock’s conclusions is that we’ve been underestimating the importance of social and psychological factors. Diet, especially when it comes to meat consumption, is highly politicized. Conservative-leaning people are likely to be dissuaded by environmentally friendly messaging, and several Republican politicians have proposed legislation to keep the alt-meat industry out of their states. Meat is also gendered, being socially linked to masculinity.

These ideas may be divorced from rationality, but people don’t always behave rationally—emotional, social, and psychological forces are at play, too. It comes as a bit of a blow to think that even if someone in the culinary or food tech spaces creates the most delicious burger the world has ever seen, and at an affordable price, most people will still go for regular old beef.

One caveat to all this is that the Nectar study found there’s still room for improvement in taste even among the top performing products. For example, it reported that among those who preferred the plant-based products, they preferred them less strongly than those who preferred animal meat. In other words, the animal meat attracted more die-hard fans. This partially explains why some plant-based brands won a “Tasty Award,” in the language of Nectar, but not a Parity or Superiority Award, which is reserved for products that have an equal or much greater chance of being preferred. Still, the limitations of taste are clear. Given more than half of participants rated 20 plant-based meat products the same or better than animal-based meat, we’d expect plant-based meat sales to be a lot higher if taste primarily explained consumer behavior.

As frustrating as it may be to champions of alt-meat, this is information we can use. Price, taste, and convenience are certainly factors in consumer choice (if smaller factors than we previously believed), and it can only help the sector—and thus, make a real difference in changing the way people eat—to make plant-based meat as tasty and cheap as possible. All of the time and resources going toward that have, likely, not been wasted. 

But now, it’s clear we need to diversify our attention. We need researchers to delve into the more amorphous factors that drive people’s food choices, and we need marketers and educators to include them in their messaging. When someone chooses meat over plant-based alternatives, even when they acknowledge that the plant-based option tastes just as good, we need to find out why.

We need to start gathering information so we can make a real effort to combat the psychological and social factors keeping people from switching to alternative meats. What is it that’s actually stopping them, and how can we remove or lessen those obstacles? Answers to these questions won’t come easy, but nothing worthwhile ever does.