Workshop discussion has raised scepticism about whether current PBA market evidence is informative enough to justify studying substitution patterns now. This note examines three related questions.
Evidence compiled: retail market-share by format, channel, and geography (§01–04) · consumer composition — who buys and for what purpose (§04.5) · blinded sensory taste-comparability (§06) · welfare-mapping by animal type (§07). This note does not estimate substitution elasticities; it examines whether the category is informative enough that such studies would be worth pursuing.
The sceptical concerns are partially but not fully supported. Overall share is genuinely low (US retail: 1.4%; Germany: 3.1%) and most products lag on taste. But three patterns make the evidence more informative than a simple dismissal implies: within the US, channel-level penetration varies widely — natural/specialty retailers such as Whole Foods reach ~8% of packaged-meat dollars vs 1.4% in mainstream multi-outlet retail; most buyers are omnivores or flexitarians rather than prior veg*ns, though whether they buy for their own consumption or as proxy for a veg*n household member remains open (§04.5); and better-tasting product categories capture 10× more market share, showing taste improvements have measurable adoption effects. Whether these patterns extrapolate to higher-quality, larger-market conditions is the central unresolved question.
The US is the only major market where someone has published a cross-tabulation of plant-based share by product format. Penetration is 2–4× higher in reformed and comminuted formats — processed products made from ground, mixed, or extruded ingredients rather than whole-muscle cuts (e.g., breakfast links, nuggets, burger patties) — than the 1.4% category average. Patties reach 6–7% on a narrow denominator (pre-formed packaged patties only — excludes random-weight ground beef). A separate channel split shows the category reaching roughly 8% of packaged-meat dollars in the natural and specialty channel (stores like Whole Foods and similar independents, with 40%+ of sales from natural/organic/specialty products) versus 1.4% in mainstream multi-outlet³⁶. The whole-cut category is too small to register meaningfully in public summaries. Note: no equivalent format-level cross-tabulation is published for European markets — GFI Europe's country reports give format composition within PBM, but not PBM's share of conventional by format.
Germany is a useful comparator, with a published 3.1% share of pre-packaged meat by volume in 2024⁸. This is not a claim that Germany is the highest-penetration market, only that it is one of the better-documented international cases in the current source set. The UK figure cannot be cleanly calculated from the most recent Circana dataset because animal-meat coverage is incomplete¹¹; an older NielsenIQ-based estimate put pan-European share at roughly 6% by value in 2022¹⁴. That Europe figure is not a clean comparator to Germany, because it uses an older dataset, different country coverage, and value instead of volume. The Netherlands and Spain track plant-based milk much more closely than meat: plant-based milk reaches nearly 10% of milk in Spain¹⁷, while plant-based meat sits in the low single digits.
Share of conventional could not be calculated for the UK from the latest Circana dataset due to incomplete animal-meat coverage¹¹. Netherlands and Spain similarly lack a published share-of-conventional figure for meat. The apparent gap between the 6% Europe (2022) and 3.1% Germany (2024) figures reflects four compounding differences: different years (2022 vs. 2024), different measurement bases (value-based NielsenIQ vs. volume-based Circana), different country sets (13 countries vs. Germany alone), and likely genuine variation across countries. Some northern European markets — notably the Netherlands (home of The Vegetarian Butcher) and the Nordic countries, where per-capita consumption of plant-based foods is high — probably sit above Germany, which would raise the 13-country average. However, no published within-format share breakdown is available for these markets, and the 6% figure should not be treated as a clean comparison to the Germany 3.1%.
Less consequential than the share-of-conventional question, but useful for context: where European plant-based meat sales actually concentrate. Sausage-style products dominate Germany⁹, reflecting both conventional German sausage culture and the strategic focus of Rügenwalder Mühle, a legacy sausage maker reportedly holding ~70% of the German plant-based meat market¹⁹. The UK mix is more diversified across mince-style ingredients, sausages, and breaded products. These are compositional shares of plant-based meat sales, not shares of conventional. Public summaries do not publish the within-format "ladder" needed to say what plant-based sausage's share of conventional sausage is in Germany or the UK.
UK plant-based meat is also pork-leading by animal type (37% pork/ham, 28% beef, ~35% other including chicken¹²), which reflects the same sausage-format dominance.
Penetration in Europe is roughly three times the US level. Around a third of households in the UK and Germany bought plant-based meat at least once in 2024¹⁰, against 11% in the US in 2025⁶. The category reaches more people in Europe but with smaller, less frequent baskets per household, which explains why retail dollar sales between the two regions are closer than the penetration numbers would suggest.
Netherlands context (different methodology, not directly comparable): GFI Europe reports that 62% of Dutch households "occasionally purchased plant-based alternatives instead of meat or fish" in 2024³⁹. The Netherlands ranks 2nd in per-capita plant-based spend (€15.78) among the six European countries in the GFI Europe dataset, with at least 11 Dutch retailers committed to 60% plant-based protein by 2030. Plant-based protein's share of Dutch supermarket protein sales reached 41.6% in 2024 — a unique Dutch retail metric driven by legumes, nuts, and other whole plant foods, not PBM analogues alone.
Two related but distinct questions are worth separating. First: are PBM purchasers mostly prior vegetarians who would not have bought conventional meat anyway? Second: even where the purchaser is an omnivore, are they buying PBM for their own consumption — or for a veg*n spouse, child, or guest?
The first concern is not well-supported by available evidence: the large majority of PBM purchasers — measured by purchaser count in consumer surveys, not by volume or by regular-buyer frequency — are omnivores or flexitarians who also buy conventional meat. The second concern is harder to resolve. Household-level scanner data cannot identify who within the household consumes what, and the consumer surveys that establish omnivore dominance do not ask whether the purchase was for the respondent's own consumption. Neither question is fully settled by the 96% dual-buyer figure.
A further caveat on coverage: the 11% US household penetration figure means households that bought PBM at least once in 2025. Of those, 62% bought more than once — meaning repeat buyers represent roughly 7% of US households. The evidence below concerns all buyers; whether the conclusions hold for regular repeat buyers specifically is a further open question.
Consumer panel data reinforces the survey evidence: 96% of US households that purchased plant-based meat in 2025 also purchased conventional meat²⁸, and only roughly 2.8% of all PBMA-buying households purchased plant-based meat exclusively with no conventional meat purchases²⁹. In Germany, only 5% of consumers exclusively consume alternative proteins; the rest consume both³⁵.
| Evidence toward self-consumption by omnivores | Evidence allowing for proxy-purchase for veg*n members |
| 46% of US lapsed buyers cite their own taste dissatisfaction²⁶ — if purchases were purely on behalf of veg*n family, the buyer's own taste experience wouldn't drive lapsing | Roughly 33% of US households have at least one member following a vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, or flexitarian diet³⁷ — mixed households are common enough that proxy-buying is structurally plausible |
| Beyond Meat reports ~70% of its consumers self-identify as flexitarians actively reducing their own meat consumption³⁸ — suggesting personal rather than proxy consumption for at least one major brand | Veg*n-only households spend roughly 3× more per household on PBM than dual-buying households, suggesting veg*ns are the more motivated buyers; dual-buyers' lower per-household spend could partly reflect infrequent proxy-purchases for one household member³⁴ |
| US buyer households average 6 plant-based purchase occasions per year²⁸ — roughly once every 8 weeks, which is consistent with personal dietary variety but also with occasional catering for a veg*n household member or frequent guest | Household-level scanner data (Neuhofer & Lusk 2022) cannot identify who within the household consumes each purchase — individual dietary recall matched to purchase panels would be needed to answer this directly²⁹ |
A few additional data points that matter for interpreting the market-share evidence. These are not direct displacement estimates, but they help distinguish three separate questions: current scale, price sensitivity, and whether a PB purchase replaces an animal-product purchase.
PB burgers contributed roughly 25% of total burger growth across the EU Big 5 over this period.
| US plant-based beef price premium vs conventional beef, category average (2025)²¹ | +8% (avg) |
| German PB meat price premium vs conventional meat (2024)⁸ | +45% |
| Hypothetical US burger experiment: PBMA choice when PB burgers are half the meat-burger price vs price parity³⁰ | 21.3% → 37.8% |
| US PB meat buyer households that also bought conventional meat in 2025²⁸ | 96% |
| Plant-based milk share of US milk dollar sales (2025) — for comparison¹ | 13% |
| Plant-based milk share of Spain milk volume (2024)¹⁷ | ~10% |
| Germany PB meat substitute production volume, 2025 (Destatis)¹⁸ | 124,900 t |
| Global PB meat & seafood retail sales, 2025 (Euromonitor)¹⁵ | $6.6B |
| US plant-based meat share of packaged-meat dollars · natural/specialty channel vs. mainstream³⁶ | ~8% vs 1.4% |
| Global PBM retail as % of estimated conventional meat+seafood retail equivalent¹⁵³¹³² | ~0.1–0.25% |
| Rough conventional meat + aquatic-animal food flow, before a retail price conversion³¹³² | ~530M t |
The US +8% plant-based beef premium is a category average, not an Impossible/Beyond-specific SKU comparison, and GFI notes that the conventional comparator includes higher-priced beef cuts underrepresented in PB beef. A clean branded price comparison would require SKU-level retailer data.
No public source here gives a like-for-like global conventional retail denominator. A rough calibration is still possible. Conventional side: 365 Mt global meat + ~165 Mt aquatic animals for human consumption ≈ 530 Mt. At illustrative retail prices of $3, $5, and $8/kg that is roughly $1.6T, $2.7T, and $4.2T. PBA side: at a rough retail price of ~$10/kg, the $6.6B global PBM figure implies roughly 0.6–0.8 Mt of plant-based product volume. Together: PBM is roughly 0.1–0.15% of conventional by volume, or 0.16–0.4% by illustrative retail value. These are order-of-magnitude calibrations, not matched market-share estimates.
The dominant public source is NECTAR (Nonprofit Consortium for Education, Tasting, And Research), which has now run two large blinded sensory studies. The 2025 study²⁴ is the headline: 2,684 omnivore and flexitarian consumers in New York and San Francisco, 122 plant-based products across 14 categories, blind-tasted at restaurants. The 2024 inaugural study²⁵ was smaller (1,150 consumers, 45 products, 5 categories) but used the same methodology. The headline gap is wide and consistent, but not absolute: some specific products do perform well, and one academic blinded burger study found a high-end plant-based burger outperforming 100% beef in the blind condition²⁷.
The gap between average conventional and average PB is 38 percentage points. The gap between conventional and the best PB products is 22 percentage points. Even the best plant-based meat is rated favorably by under half of consumers.
| Products tested (NECTAR 2025)²⁴ | 122 across 14 categories |
| Products reaching parity²⁴ | 20 of 122 (16%) |
| Best single product (Impossible Unbreaded Chicken Fillet) · probability of preference over conventional²⁴ | 31% |
| Texture gap: PB "juiciness" relative to conventional²⁴ | −62% |
| Hardest categories named by NECTAR²⁴ | Bacon, bratwurst, whole-cut steak |
| Most favorable public category result²⁵ | Nuggets reached parity in 2024 |
| US PB meat lapsed-buyer rate citing taste dissatisfaction²⁶ | 46% |
| Categories with parity winners (textures easier to mimic)²⁴ | Burgers, nuggets, sausage patties, hot dogs, meatballs |
| Categories with no parity winners (complex textures)²⁴ | Bacon, bratwurst, whole-cut steak, pulled pork |
| Market-share premium: categories with better average taste vs. worse-tasting categories²⁴ | 10× more market share |
The workshop question is not just "how large is plant-based meat today?" It is whether lowering the price, improving quality, or expanding availability of plant-based alternatives would reduce animal-product consumption enough to matter for welfare. Market share is a necessary input, but it is not the welfare quantity.
A useful decomposition: animal-welfare impact depends on (a) how much extra PB consumption an intervention induces, (b) what fraction of that displaces animal products rather than replacing vegetarian food or simply adding to total calories consumed, (c) which animal types bear that displacement and in what proportions, and (d) how much the supply of animal products adjusts in response. Term (c) requires separate estimates for each species — chicken, shrimp, fish, beef, pork, eggs — since welfare weights differ sharply across them; it is a sum across animal types, not a single multiplier. The retail market-share, consumer-panel, and taste-comparability data compiled here give partial evidence on term (a). They give weak or no direct evidence on (b), (c), or (d).
| Market share | Bounds current scale and shows which formats have traction. It does not tell us whether the next PB unit replaces meat, replaces other vegetarian food, or simply increases total food consumption with no displacement. This is about the information content of share data — not an argument against studying displacement rates directly through scanner panels or field experiments. |
| Price evidence | Public retail data shows large price gaps between animal meat and PBM equivalents across many animal types, while a hypothetical burger experiment finds large PBMA price cuts can shift choices away from meat³⁰. This supports price as a live lever, but it is not a field elasticity estimate. |
| Dual buyers | The fact that 96% of US PB meat buyer households also buy conventional meat is not, by itself, evidence of low displacement²⁸. It means the category has reached omnivore households where displacement is possible. The unresolved question is what those households would have purchased — over the relevant period, not necessarily on the same shopping trip — had the PBM option not been available: conventional meat, another plant-based food, something else entirely, or simply more food overall with no displacement of any animal product. Note that intertemporal compensation can cut both ways: a household that buys PBM on one occasion might compensate by eating more conventional meat on a subsequent trip or at a restaurant, which would reduce or eliminate net displacement; or it might gradually shift towards less meat overall. |
| Panel evidence | A Scientific Reports household-panel study found most PBMA buyers also bought ground meat, and ground-meat purchases did not fall after first PBMA purchase²⁹. This is relevant evidence against assuming one-for-one displacement in current conditions, but it is observational (not clearly causal), specific to a particular context (US household purchases, mostly ground beef products, pre-2022), and operates at the household level — it cannot separate whether the omnivore or a veg*n household member is the PBM consumer. It is not an argument against studying displacement through randomised experiments or quasi-experimental designs. |
| Animal-welfare mapping | A kilogram of displaced beef, chicken, egg, finfish, or shrimp has very different animal-welfare implications depending on how many animals are involved and what welfare weights are applied. By sheer animal count: global shrimp farming produces roughly 370 billion individuals per year from ~6 Mt; wild and farmed fish together involve hundreds of billions of individuals; broiler chickens account for roughly 80 billion land-animal deaths per year globally (from ~130 Mt of production), far exceeding cattle (~300M slaughtered, ~70 Mt). On a per-kilogram basis, chickens involve roughly 2–3 individuals, shrimp involve roughly 100–2,300 individuals depending on species.⁴⁰ Beef, which has the lowest animal count per kilogram and receives much of the PBM category attention (Beyond, Impossible), may be less welfare-relevant per unit displaced than chicken, shrimp, or finfish if welfare weights are even slightly positive for those species. This matters: nuggets and sausage patties — the highest-penetration formats — map onto chicken, which is a high-animal-count category. |
Euromonitor's global PB meat and seafood retail estimate is $6.6B in 2025¹⁵. There is no matched public conventional retail denominator in this source bundle, but production volumes give an order-of-magnitude comparison.
OECD/FAO estimates global meat production at 365 Mt in 2024³¹. FAO reports 185.4 Mt of aquatic animals in 2022, with 89% used for direct human consumption, or roughly 165 Mt³². Together that is about 530 Mt before aligning weights, processing losses, and retail prices.
At illustrative retail-equivalent prices of $3, $5, and $8/kg, that conventional scale would be roughly $1.6T, $2.7T, and $4.2T. The $6.6B PB category would then be about 0.4%, 0.25%, or 0.16% of the broad conventional scale. These numbers are deliberately rough: they are for calibration, not a publishable market-share estimate.
Is current adoption evidence informative for funding decisions about reducing PBA price, improving quality/nutrition, and expanding availability, or are current products too small and too imperfect to tell us much?
Two sceptical claims frame part of the workshop discussion. First claim (scale and quality): "PBM's market share is so low and product quality so poor that current market evidence tells us little about future substitution patterns — and little research effort is warranted." Second claim (consumer type): "The people currently buying PBM are mostly prior vegetarians, so the category cannot be expected to displace animal-product consumption at scale even if the market grew." The evidence above bears on both. The second claim is not well-supported by available data: §04.5 shows that roughly 85–88% of US PBM buyers are omnivores or flexitarians, not prior vegetarians — though the harder question of whether omnivore purchasers eat it themselves (rather than buying for veg*n household members) is less settled. The first claim has more force — low share, quality gaps, and declining US penetration are real. But none of these rule out the category being informative about price sensitivity, format-level variation, or the conditions under which higher adoption could occur. And they do not argue against studying substitution rates directly through scanner panels or experiments.
This section maps what the present evidence can and cannot support. It is not a replacement for an elasticity model or welfare model.
Each footnote in the dashboard links to a numbered row here. The full quote (or specific evidence) is shown in italics. URLs are direct links to the cited page or PDF where available.
| № | Source | Quoted evidence and link |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | GFI · "Analyzing plant-based meat & seafood sales" Free |
"In 2025, plant-based meat and seafood's dollar share was 1.4 percent of total retail packaged meat dollar sales, or approximately 0.7 percent of the total meat category, including random-weight meat. For reference, plant-based milk has grown to represent 13 percent of total milk dollar sales." Data from SPINS (powered by Circana) for 52 weeks ending Nov 30 2025. https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 2 | GFI · format-level shares (2024 estimate) Free |
"Based on 2024 data, we estimated that plant-based patties held a six to seven percent share of total retail packaged meat patty dollar sales, compared to the less than two percent share plant-based meat and seafood held of overall retail packaged meat dollar sales." https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ (Product format section) |
| 3 | GFI · breakfast format share Free |
"Plant-based breakfast links and patties held a roughly three to four percent dollar share" of their respective packaged-meat subcategory (2024 estimate, SPINS). https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 4 | GFI · nuggets/tenders/wings format share Free |
"Plant-based nuggets, tenders, and wings held a roughly two to three percent share of their respective packaged meat subcategories" (2024 estimate, SPINS). https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 5 | GFI · animal-type shares Free |
"Based on 2024 data, we estimated that plant-based chicken, beef, and pork products each held a roughly two to three percent dollar share of their respective retail packaged meat categories." https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 6 | GFI/SPINS · US household penetration Free |
"In 2025, 11 percent of U.S. households purchased plant-based meat and seafood, with 62 percent of them purchasing more than once. … This is down from a high of roughly 20% in 2021." https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 7 | GFI/SPINS · US retail market size Free |
"The U.S. plant-based meat and seafood retail market was estimated at $1.0 billion in 2025, up significantly from $682 million in 2017." https://gfi.org/resource/analyzing-plant-based-meat-and-seafood-sales/ |
| 8 | GFI Europe · Germany 2022-2024 (Circana) Free |
From the Market Share section, p.19: "As a percentage of the total sales volume of plant- and animal-based pre-packaged meat products, plant-based meat had a market share of 3.0% in 2022, rising slightly to 3.1% in 2024." Also p.20: "By 2024, plant-based meat was 45% more expensive than animal-based meat." Germany 2022-2024 PDF (GFI Europe, June 2025) |
| 9 | GFI Europe · Germany format mix Free |
Product format breakdown, p.18: "Sausage/salami led the market with 34.7% of sales volume in 2024, meatballs at 13.8% and schnitzel/medallions at 13.6%. The emerging steak/fillet category grew from 2.5% in 2022 to 4.2% in 2024." Germany 2022-2024 PDF (p.18) |
| 10 | GFI Europe / NielsenIQ · household penetration Free |
Germany p.14: "32.2% of households bought plant-based meat at least once in 2024" (down from 32.7% in 2023). UK PDF summary: "32% of households bought plant-based meat… at least once in 2024." Source: NIQ Homescan Consumer Panel (20,000 households Germany, 30,000 UK). https://gfieurope.org/european-plant-based-sales-data/ |
| 11 | GFI Europe · UK 2022 to Jan 2025 Free |
The UK PDF explicitly notes that "the Circana dataset did not include complete data on animal-based meat and seafood, and it was therefore not possible to calculate market shares for plant-based meat and seafood." Format mix (volume): ingredients 23%, sausages 22%, breaded/coated 13%, burgers 11%, other 31%. UK 2022-2024 PDF (GFI Europe) |
| 12 | GFI Europe · UK animal-type mix Free |
Animal-type breakdown of plant-based meat in the UK (volume, year to Jan 2025): plant-based pork/ham 37%, plant-based beef 28%, other (incl. chicken and lamb) ~35%. Pork-leading mix reflects sausage-format dominance. UK 2022-2024 PDF (GFI Europe) |
| 13 | GFI Europe · UK overall PB meat market Free |
UK plant-based meat retail value: £333M in 2024; sales volume 35.4 million kg; both down ~10-12% YoY. Frozen 57% of volume. UK 2022-2024 PDF (GFI Europe) |
| 14 | GFI Europe / NielsenIQ · 2020-2022 EU Free |
Pan-European plant-based meat share of pre-packaged meat reported at ~6% by value in 2022 across 13 countries (older NielsenIQ-based methodology, not directly comparable to current Circana figures). 2020-2022 Europe retail market insights (PDF) |
| 15 | Euromonitor International · global retail Paid |
"Euromonitor estimates that global plant-based meat and seafood retail sales (excluding tofu and tempeh) were $6.6 billion in 2025." The US accounted for 28% of global PB meat retail dollar sales in 2025; Europe was the largest region at ~$3.6B (Euromonitor, 2025). GFI page citing Euromonitor estimates |
| 16 | Circana · EU foodservice (CREST) Paid |
EU Big 5 out-of-home plant-based meat servings up 48% vs 2019. "Plant-based burgers grew significantly by +90% during year ending August 2023 vs 2019, and +20% year-on-year… representing a quarter (25%) of the total contribution made to growth in burgers." Direct Circana press release (not GFI). Circana press release (Nov 2023) |
| 17 | GFI Europe · Spain Free |
"Almost 10% of all milk sold in Spain in 2024 was plant-based." Household penetration: 46% PB milk, 22% PB meat at least once in 2024 (NIQ Homescan, 8,000-household panel). Spain 2022-2024 PDF (GFI Europe) |
| 18 | Destatis · Germany production data Gov't |
German Federal Statistical Office direct production statistics: 124,900 tonnes of meat substitutes produced in Germany in 2025, down 1.2% from 126,500 t in 2024. Production value €632.6M (2025). Production-side data, not retail. Just-Food coverage of the Destatis release · primary source: Destatis Genesis-Online |
| 19 | ProVeg / industry coverage · Rügenwalder Mühle Free |
Rügenwalder Mühle, originally a sausage and cold-cuts producer, is widely reported in industry press to hold around 70% of the German plant-based meat market. Corporate self-report; not independently verified by scanner data, but consistent with the format mix and consolidation seen in the German PB meat market. ProVeg corporate article (illustrative; figure circulates in multiple industry sources) |
| 20 | NECTAR · sensory research Free |
NECTAR (Nonprofit Consortium for Education, Tasting, And Research, hosted by Mercy For Animals) blinded sensory study with 1,100+ US consumers. Of five plant-based formats tested (burgers, hot dogs, bacon, nuggets, tenders), only plant-based nuggets reached parity with their animal-based counterparts. Independent of GFI. NECTAR sensory research page |
| 21 | GFI/SPINS · US price gap Free |
"Most plant-based meat and seafood animal types are still priced 1 to 3 times higher than their conventional equivalents. Plant-based beef is a notable exception, priced just eight percent higher than conventional beef in 2025 (although this includes typically higher-priced conventional beef cuts like steaks that are underrepresented in plant-based beef)." GFI Analyzing PB meat & seafood sales |
| 22 | Choices Magazine (AAEA) · PBMA Circana analysis Free |
Peer-reviewed analysis of Circana retail data 2019-2022: "PB beef alternatives are primarily available as ground products (70% of PB beef alternative revenue), patties (15%), or burgers (15%)… PB chicken alternatives, on the other hand, are exclusively frozen and include various product types, such as nuggets and tenders." Independent academic source (Agricultural & Applied Economics Association). Choices Magazine article |
| 23 | 210 Analytics · US assortment data Free |
210 Analytics processes Circana data for the US grocery industry. April 2025: refrigerated alt meat carried at 9.7 SKUs per store on average, down 10.3% YoY and down 31% from early 2021. Some items shifted to frozen set; reflects retailer assortment compression. AgFunder News (May 2025) |
| 24 | NECTAR · Taste of the Industry 2025 Free |
Largest publicly available sensory analysis of plant-based meats. 2,684 omnivore and flexitarian consumers in NY and SF, 122 PB products across 14 categories, blind tasting at restaurants. Key findings: average PB rated favorably by 30% of consumers vs 68% for conventional; 20 of 122 products (16%) reached parity (≥50% rating as good or better); best single product (Impossible Unbreaded Chicken Fillet) reached 31% probability of preference over conventional. Texture identified as biggest opportunity, especially in bacon, bratwurst, whole-cut steak. PB products were 62% less juicy than animal counterparts. NECTAR Taste of the Industry 2025 (full data dashboard) |
| 25 | NECTAR · Taste of the Industry 2024 Free |
Inaugural NECTAR study, 1,150 US omnivores, 45 plant-based products, 5 categories (burgers, hot dogs, bacon, nuggets, chicken tenders). Key finding: "of five plant-based product types tested, only plant-based nuggets performed comparably to their animal-based counterparts." Established that reformed/comminuted formats are closest to sensory parity. The 2025 expansion added 77 more products and 9 more categories. NECTAR sensory research page |
| 26 | NECTAR / Food Ingredients First · lapsed buyer evidence Free |
Caroline Cotto (director of NECTAR), via Food Ingredients First: "Consumer adoption is weakening, with 46% of US buyers not making repeat purchases claiming 'taste dissatisfaction'." Identifies taste as the primary reason for the US plant-based meat lapsed-buyer effect, consistent with GFI's separate consumer-survey data. NECTAR news (Cotto interview, 2025) |
| 27 | Caputo et al. 2023 · academic blinded sensory study Free |
Sensory experiment combined with discrete choice experiment on burger patty selection. n=175 untrained participants, random assignment to blind or informed tasting conditions. Compared four products: pea protein burger, "animal-like protein" burger, hybrid (70% beef + 30% mushroom), and 100% beef. Result: in the blind condition the "animal-like protein" plant-based burger was ranked most preferred, followed by 100% beef. Confirms that specific high-quality PB products can match or beat conventional in blinded trials. Caputo et al., Food Research International (2023) |
| 28 | GFI/SPINS · dual-buyer purchase dynamics Free |
Consumer panel section: among US households that purchased plant-based meat in 2025, 96% also purchased conventional meat. Those households averaged about 6 PB purchase occasions and 11.7 PB units, versus 33 conventional-meat occasions and 80 conventional-meat units. GFI frames this as an opportunity to grow PB share of meat purchases, not as a displacement estimate. GFI Analyzing PB meat & seafood sales, Consumer purchase dynamics |
| 29 | Neuhofer & Lusk 2022 · Scientific Reports Free |
Household panel analysis of 38,966 households and 7,761 PBMA-buying households. The authors conclude that PBMAs largely did not deter meat demand among purchasing households; most PBMA buyers also bought ground meat, and average weekly ground-meat units/expenditure increased after the first PBMA purchase. Observational evidence, not a randomized price experiment. Nature Scientific Reports: Most PBMA buyers also buy meat |
| 30 | Jahn, Guhl & Erhard 2024 · PNAS / PMC Free |
Two representative US online studies (n=2,126) on burger alternatives. In price simulations, when PBMAs moved from price parity with a $10 meat burger to half-price ($5), PBMA choice rose from 21.3% to 37.8%, while meat choice fell from 73.9% to 57.0%. Hypothetical restaurant-choice evidence; useful for price sensitivity, not a field displacement estimate. PMC full text: Substitution patterns and price response for PBMAs |
| 31 | OECD/FAO Agricultural Outlook 2025-2034 · meat Gov't |
OECD/FAO estimate for conventional meat scale: global meat production reached 365 Mt in 2024. The Outlook is production-volume evidence, not a retail-value denominator. OECD/FAO Agricultural Outlook 2025-2034, Meat chapter |
| 32 | FAO SOFIA 2024 · aquatic animals Gov't |
FAO's 2024 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture release reports 2022 production of 185.4 million tonnes of aquatic animals and states that 89% of total aquatic animal production was used for direct human consumption. Estimated first-sale value of fisheries and aquaculture production: USD 472B. FAO newsroom release for SOFIA 2024 |
| 33 | Rethink Priorities · cross-price elasticity review Free |
Shallow review of cross-price elasticity evidence for plant-based analogs and animal products. The authors find wide variation and unexpected signs in butter/margarine estimates, after similar concerns in plant-based milk/dairy milk, and conclude that price substitution between plant-based analogs and animal products is not a certainty. Rethink Priorities: Inconsistent evidence for price substitution |
| 34 | Hartman Group · plant-based buyer dietary profile Paid / summarized |
Multiple Hartman Group consumer surveys: approximately 12–15% of plant-based meat purchasers identify as vegetarian or vegan; 41–57% describe their eating style as omnivore; the remainder are flexitarian. Among all US consumers: roughly 1% vegan, 2% vegetarian, 9% flexitarian — so approximately 88% of the general population is omnivore. Plant-based purchasers skew younger (especially Millennials), female, college-educated, and higher-income relative to the general population. Hartman Group: Who's buying plant-based foods? |
| 35 | GFI Europe · European consumer insights 2024 Free |
Representative surveys in Germany, UK, France, and Spain (2024): only 5% of German, 4% of UK, 3% of French, and 2% of Spanish consumers exclusively consume alternative proteins rather than animal products. 25% of Germans, 23% of UK, 30% of Spanish report either mostly or evenly consuming alt proteins alongside conventional proteins. Top three purchasing motivations (2023 survey, across European countries): taste (53%), health (46%), affordability (45%). Purchase frequency: 10% of German households bought PBM 12+ times in 2024 ("frequent purchasers"); UK 9%; Spain only 3%. GFI Europe: European consumer insights on the alternative protein sector |
| 40 | FAO FAOSTAT + Rethink Priorities · animal counts and welfare weights Gov't + Free |
FAO FAOSTAT production data: global broiler chicken slaughter approximately 80 billion birds per year producing roughly 130 Mt of meat; cattle approximately 300 million slaughtered per year, roughly 70 Mt; farmed shrimp roughly 6 Mt from an estimated 370 billion individuals. Wild-capture and farmed fish together involve hundreds of billions of individual animals annually. On a per-kilogram basis: broiler chicken involves roughly 2–3 individuals/kg; farmed shrimp 100–2,300 individuals/kg depending on species size. Rethink Priorities' "Moral Weights" research provides contested but tractable welfare-weight estimates across species — on number-of-animals alone, shrimp and fish dominate over land animals, though the welfare-weight ranking is sensitive to sentience assumptions. FAO FAOSTAT · Rethink Priorities: Moral Weights |
| 37 | Mixed-household prevalence · multiple surveys Free / summarized |
Multiple US consumer surveys find that approximately 33% of US households include at least one member voluntarily following a vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, or flexitarian diet. This figure means mixed-diet households — where an omnivore adult may be the designated shopper who buys PBM for a veg*n household member — are structurally common enough to matter for interpreting household-level scanner data. FMI: Flexitarians powering plant-based sales |
| 38 | Beyond Meat / industry sources · flexitarian consumer share Free / industry |
Beyond Meat and similar industry sources report that approximately 70% of plant-based meat consumers self-identify as flexitarians — people actively reducing their own meat consumption, not purely purchasing as a service to veg*n household members. This self-identification data supports the interpretation that omnivore purchasers are largely buying for their own dietary variety or reduction goals. Note: this is brand/industry self-reported data and should be interpreted with appropriate caution. Flexitarians: The Most Important Target Group for Plant-Based Products |
| 39 | GFI Europe · Netherlands 2022-2024 Free |
GFI Europe press release (2025): 62% of Dutch households occasionally purchased plant-based alternatives instead of meat or fish in 2024, a 13% increase since 2020. The Netherlands ranks 2nd highest per-capita plant-based spender among six European countries studied (€15.78/capita in 2024, behind Germany's €19.92). Plant-based milk held 7.7% of total milk market volume (2024). Plant-based protein's share of Dutch supermarket protein sales: 41.6% in 2024 (unique Dutch metric driven by the retail sector's 60% plant-protein target; includes legumes, nuts, and other whole plant foods, not just PBM analogues). Foodservice plant-based meat volumes grew 111% from 2021-2023. PBM retail volumes fell 6.2% in 2024. Note: the 62% figure likely uses a different methodology (survey rather than scanner panel) than the NielsenIQ Homescan figures used for Germany and UK. GFI Europe: State of plant-based in the Netherlands (2025) |
| 36 | GFI / SPINS · US natural vs. mainstream channel comparison Free |
GFI analysis of SPINS data: plant-based meat and seafood reaches roughly 8% of packaged-meat dollar sales in the natural and specialty enhanced channel, compared to 1.4% in mainstream multi-outlet (MULO). The natural channel covers roughly 1,900 full-format stores with $2M+ annual sales and 40%+ of UPC sales from natural/organic/specialty products. The 5–6× differential reflects both self-selection by committed plant-based shoppers and a different price/product mix in natural-channel stores. Distribution in the natural channel fell 15% in 2024 (vs 9% in MULO), suggesting continued category contraction even in its strongest channel. AgFunder News: Plant-based meat by numbers (May 2025) · GFI / SPINS analysis |