Lastly, here's the new citation: Peacock, J. R. (2026). Price-, taste-, and convenience-competitive plant-based meat analogues would not currently replace the majority of meat consumption: A narrative review. Appetite, 216, 108301. doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2025.108301

The new section reviews recent literature which "suggested that decreased plant-based meat, butter and milk analogue prices might cause increased consumption of the corresponding animal product" and moving plant-based meat analogues to the meat aisle didn't meaningfully effect meat consumption

So, what's new?
✅ Shorter
✅ More and updated citations
✅ Methods section
✅ Error bars in figures
✅ New section, "Studies of price and convenience manipulations individually"

with @jessica-hope.bsky.social, @setgree.bsky.social, and Maya Mathur

I share your frustration. In live action media, I assume humanoid aliens with additive features reflect limitations of practical effects. But animated works especially tend to have nonsense biology and especially biomechanics. And CGI gives us human clone troopers with impossibly narrow helmets...

One PB option brings that down to 84%, two options 78% and a third option just 75%. This definitely surprised me...I thought 3 options would have a larger effect.

We have a similar study pre-registered here osf.io/z9486%E2%80%... update your priors and start forecasting our results!

This metric moderately favors PB meat burger, although note wide CIs.

One last notable result: simulating counterfactuals suggested adding PB options quickly reaches diminishing returns. With no PB options, 92% of participants chose beef (the rest wouldn't buy).

Third col shows the market share of beef in a simulated two-item market with one of the 3 alternatives; the PB meat burger was slightly worse here. But, in col 4, the effect of reducing the alternative price by 1% on market share of beef (cross-price elasticity).

(Ranges are 95% CIs; I used point estimates where CIs weren't reported.) Estimated market shares of the four products competing at equal prices told slightly different stories in Studies 1 & 2, but the takeaway is that the alternatives probably performed about the same.

(and enables a "counterfactual estimation" as if some options weren't available, although I'm somewhat skeptical of this approach).

Results updated me a bit: while I thought the falafel or veggie burger might come out slightly ahead, it wasn't decisive across 4 different measures:

After a choose-one (discrete choice) question, participants were asked a clever follow-up: suppose that option was out of stock, what would you get instead? This seems like a cheap way to get participants to rank options and thus more sensitivity from a single study

These span the gamut from analog to semi-analog to non-analog plant-based alternatives to meat. After a choose-one (discrete choice) question, participants were asked a clever follow-up: suppose that option was out of stock, what would you get instead?

Thanks, enjoyed this!

I'd be interested to join!