Imagine this: You’re hungry. You’ve arrived at the frozen foods section of the grocery store, and you’re faced with two options: a pack of chicken nuggets or a pack of similar-looking nuggets, but made without meat. How do you choose? Do you look at price first or compare ingredient lists? Or maybe, after you do both, do you ultimately go with your gut? You are hungry, after all.
A new report highlights the important role that taste plays for consumers when considering whether to buy plant-based protein. Nectar, an Oakland-based initiative conducting research on faux meat, surveyed thousands of meat-eaters in a series of blind taste tests to find out how vegan meat substitutes stack up against the real thing — and got some surprising results.
Four vegan products received nearly indistinguishable scores from real meat — and Nectar also found that plant-based products that were rated highly in terms of taste had higher sales volume.
The report, which was released earlier this month, “underscores a simple but crucial point: Consumers want to eat food that tastes delicious, full stop,” said Abby Sewell, the corporate engagement manager at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes “alternative proteins,” the industry term for plant-based meat substitutes. (The Good Food Institute was not involved in the report and does not have any formal relationship with Nectar.)
The question of how to increase sales is one that has troubled the plant-based industry in recent years. Plant-based meat saw declining sales from 2021 to 2023, according to the Good Food Institute. In the past few years, ersatz meat brands have made headlines for steep layoffs and talk of potential acquisitions or shutdowns.
It’s also a question with potentially significant implications for the climate and the environment. About 80 percent of the world’s agricultural lands are used to raise livestock (taking into account the land used to grow crops for animal feed like soy and corn). Cutting out animal protein would free up agricultural land and reduce demands on water. Adopting a plant-based diet would also help greatly in terms of emissions. Animal agriculture is responsible for 16.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to change the way we eat — specifically, we’d have to eat less meat — to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.
Plant-based advocates often say that when faux meat products taste as good and cost as little as conventional meat options, then consumers will flock to them. But impartial information about whether vegan protein brands meet consumers’ exacting flavor standards is surprisingly hard to come by. According to Caroline Cotto, the director of Nectar, plant-based meat companies typically only perform taste tests with their own employees or investors — hardly unbiased sources.
Samantha Derrick, who leads an applied learning program on plant-based foods at University of California, Berkeley, said more third-party taste testing is “critical” to growing the industry. Derrick and Cotto both describe Nectar, an initiative born out of and funded by Food System Innovations, a philanthropic organization, as unique in the plant-based industry. When companies do taste tests internally, they typically don’t make the results of those tests publicly available the way Nectar has.
This was the second time the organization has conducted blind taste tests with plant-based protein brands. For this round, Nectar solicited more than 2,000 participants who said they eat certain meat products at least once every month or two. They selected 122 vegan products designed to look and taste like real meat across 14 categories — including breakfast sausage, meatballs, pulled pork, and steak — and prepared them alongside their animal-based counterparts. (Participants weren’t told which products were vegan and which contained meat.) The testing was conducted in New York City and San Francisco restaurants instead of sterile white rooms because Cotto wanted to replicate a familiar environment.
Nectar also plated the products in conventional ways — hot dogs in buns, pulled pork in sandwich form — instead of presenting each food item in its “naked” form. If participants were testing, say, hot dogs, they could add condiments — as long as they applied the same condiments to every hot dog they tried.
Nectar found that 20 plant-based products were rated the same or better than their animal counterparts in terms of overall liking by at least 50 percent of participants. These included five unbreaded vegan chicken fillets, five vegan burgers, and two vegan chicken nugget brands.
Four of those products performed so well they almost reached taste parity, which Nectar defines as there being no statistically significant difference in how participants scored the vegan product versus the animal one in terms of overall liking. Those four are Impossible Foods’ unbreaded chicken breast, chicken nuggets, and burger, as well as Morningstar Farms’ nuggets.
The results show that the plant-based chicken products are leading the industry in terms of closing the flavor gap, said Cotto. It might help that chicken breast is essentially a blank canvas. “From a flavor perspective, I think chicken has a more subtle flavor that’s actually easier to replicate,” she added.
The plant-based products that Nectar found most need to improve on taste — such as bacon — are some of the hardest cuts of meat to imitate. Unlike chicken fillets, chicken nuggets, or burgers, strips of bacon are not generally homogenous in texture and flavor. Mimicking fatty parts of bacon as well as the striated meat is extremely challenging to do with just plants. Sewell, from the Good Food Institute, said additional research and development could help. “Continued investment in alternative protein R&D is essential to accelerating innovation and ensuring these products deliver on flavor and affordability for consumers,” she told Grist.
Of course, there’s a difference between liking a vegan product in a taste test and actually choosing to buy it in a grocery store, when there aren’t any researchers around. “Even if taste and price parity are achieved, it’s not a surefire” guarantee that people will choose, say, vegan hot dogs and burgers over the beef kind, said Cotto. In the United States, meat is tied up with national identity and masculinity; it won’t be so easy to win every type of consumer over.
Still, Derrick, who wasn’t involved in Nectar’s study, says that younger consumers “absolutely” do not want to feel like they’re compromising on taste at the grocery store — and that research like Cotto’s will help brands figure out how to satisfy them.
“I think that blind testing is objectively done as the best way to” improve plant-based products, said Derrick. More testing would provide “a road map of what’s possible, what’s better.”
