Nudging meat eaters towards plant-based meat alternatives : an online supermarket experiment

Abstract

We implement a non-hypothetical online grocery shopping experiment to study the impact of health and environment related information nudges on consumers' purchases of meat and plant-based meat alternatives. More specifically, we exogenously manipulate an information message to appear next to meat and plantbased meat products while subjects make purchasing decisions. Subjects receive one of four treatments at random: 1) Health treatment, which displays information about the health benefits of eating less meat; 2) Environment treatment, which presents a message related to the environmental impact of reducing meat consumption; 3) Combined treatment, which displays a message that combines the information from the health and environment messages; and 4) Control, where no information is provided. Moreover, we elicit subjects' implicit association between healthiness and environmental impact of meat and plant-based meat using two implicit association tests. We find the environmental message to be an effective instrument for motivating meat eaters to purchase plant-based meat products. We also find that, on average, meat eaters in our sample implicitly perceive meat to be healthier but environmentally unsustainable compared to plant-based meat products. Furthermore, using a latent class analysis (LCA), we identify three distinct latent classes based on subjects' preferences for purchasing meat products and their plant-based meat purchases frequency. Members in Class 1 are driven by the taste and price of meat products, whereas Class 2 expresses high attention for health and environmental impact attributes and Class 3 is open to reduce their meat consumption. The LCA indicates heterogeneity of preferences across meat eaters, suggesting future interventions can target to specific consumer segments, instead of focus on general meat eaters. Overall, our findings provide implications for policy makers and food marketers as to whether meat eaters can be steered toward purchasing plant-based meat under different behavioral nudges.