Piers Morgan

• But despite sustained growth for several years, sales of plant-based meat products are now stagnating.
• The environmental benefits of adopting a diet that is less reliant on meat have been well-established.
• However, a growing ideological divide over the environment means traditional ways of encouraging people to eat plant-based meat – promoting its green credentials – could be harming sales, according to research.

Criticism of plant-based meat

• The plant-based meat market has certainly been criticised for high prices compared with animal meat.
• As plant-based meat is a relatively new product, the long-term health implications of directly replacing animal meat with it are unknown.
• Research also warns against assuming that plant-based meat is nutritionally equivalent to animal meat.
• We analysed press releases from Beyond Meat to understand how the benefits of plant-based meat are being communicated to consumers, to see if this could be a driver of the ideological divide over plant-based meat.

Testing ads about the environment

• We developed mock Facebook ads that described either the health and environmental benefits of plant-based meat, or just the health benefits.
• We found that advertising content based on the environment turned off the conservative consumers involved in our study.
• We found that environmental messaging is incongruent to conservative consumers, meaning these ads don’t spark either their curiosity or interest.