New research reveals a ‘highly effective’ strategy to increase low-emission food consumption. And it is not a carbon label. David Burrows reports.
Label lethargy. Interventions to reduce meat consumption, such as carbon labelling, have shown modest and inconsistent results. There are a number of reasons for this, as Footprint has reported. One of them is an ‘environmentalist bias’.
You’d better believe it. “People often think that their own beliefs and values are more common than they actually are. This is called the false consensus effect,” explained Chris Macdonald, director of the Better Protein Institute at the University of Cambridge. This means researchers who are also environmentalists might tend towards interventions that highlight negative environmental impacts because it is what influences them, and they may well assume that it will be equally persuasive to the average consumer. “I call this the environmentalist bias,” Macdonald said.
Planting a seed. To avoid this potential bias, Macdonald has taken a different approach, which he has found to be so effective he has written to food-to-go chain Greggs with his findings. Macdonald asked people about why they struggle to reduce the amount of meat they are eating. He then used the results to design a new label that might actually shift more consumers to more sustainable choices, including plant-based options.
Nutrition illusion. His research began with 1,500 consumers who identified protein as the most significant perceived barrier to adopting a meat-free diet. This ‘insufficiency illusion’ – the false belief that meat-free options must lack essential nutrients – emerged as a key insight and was used to create a “simple protein label”. This simply shows the protein content of the product – an example being the sausage roll at Greggs, with the pork sausage one containing 17g of protein and the vegan one 23g.
Which would you choose? In the experiment, participants were sent a link giving them access to a private online portal where they were asked to look at a menu and answer a single question: “Which one would you buy?” The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: control group, carbon group, and protein group. There were 500 participants in each group. In all groups, the menu contained only two items from Greggs: a sausage roll, and a vegan sausage roll. These were selected to “more accurately reflect reality”. For the control group, the labelling included only the item names and the item costs; for the carbon group, the labelling included additional carbon footprint data in parentheses; and for the protein group, the labelling included additional protein data in parentheses.
Simple switch for sausages. “By simply highlighting the protein content, we were able to shift an unprecedented number of consumers towards meat-free choices. As noted in the paper, in the second experiment, the meat-free meal choice was selected by less than a quarter of the participants in the control group and by over half of the participants in the protein label group – a finding consistent for men and women. This increase of more than 100% made the selection of the meat-free item the majority decision and thus marked an unprecedented step-change,” he added.
Weaner wins. The Greggs vegan sausage roll also comes with fewer greenhouse gas emissions and lower fat content. “If you would like to double the sales of your meat-free options, just add a simple label I designed that displays the protein content,” wrote Macdonald in an open letter to the chiefs at the bakery chain. “They have a unique opportunity to not only increase sales but also cement themselves as leaders in sustainability. The ball is in their court now,” he said.
Audit. Macdonald’s scientific paper, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, refers to an “insufficiency illusion” whereby consumers falsely believe certain products to be lacking in a key area (in this case, protein content). Of course, it is not always a false belief: the academic admits that it helped that this experiment used sausages which are often higher in fat and lower in protein than other common meat-based products.
Available but below average. However, there is also the “availability illusion” – when meat-free options are available but are genuinely lacking. “[A]n honest audit of the meat-free offerings will form a key part of future interventions,” he wrote. “It may be the case that prior experiments have yielded modest results or have limited potential because the meat-free options were not well considered and were legitimately poor quality.”
Bad idea. Pushing people towards ‘bad’ meat-free options can ultimately increase meat consumption in the long term. The “short-sighted ‘stick a new label on it’ approach that fails to critically review and evaluate products prior to seeking to increase their consumption” is not what we need, said Macdonald.
Positive about protein. Macdonald’s paper noted how the “path to reducing global meat consumption is paved with consumer choices” and “the most effective way to influence these choices is not necessarily to educate consumers about complicated external costs but to understand and address their immediate, personal motivations. The popular focus on carbon labelling appears to be a manifestation of an ‘environmentalist bias’, leading to interventions that are more meaningful to their creators than to their target audience.”
Definitely maybe. So far, Greggs has not replied. Nor did they respond to a request from Footprint. But surely this simple approach is food for thought for foodservice companies looking to nudge large number of consumers to new choices. Macdonald highlighted the rising tide of global meat consumption that is fuelling an “increasingly dangerous narrative: that changing consumption habits is simply too difficult. My work provides a defiant counter-narrative,” he said.
