Investors are buying Fake Meat but consumers are cautious. Neuro-Sensory Science tells us why.
Plant-based Meat is Hype. The preceding graph shows the rise of consumer awareness (black line, Google Trends) and overlays the stock price of Beyond Meat (BYND), +130% since the IPO. Strikingly, the idea of making money on plant-based meat (May ’19 BYND IPO) carries a 42% greater search engagement than the idea of consuming it (Aug ‘19 Impossible Whopper availability). Neuro Sensory Science explains why consumer adoption rates will be more tepid than the past 5 months of media coverage and stock performance might have you believing.
The idea of plant-based meat has been championed as the solution to many of our world’s problems… health issues (obesity, cholesterol), global warming (less cows belching methane), animal welfare concerns and many others. The products are a bit of a phenomenon, combining some real technology advances with some slick marketing and the right cultural timing. However, the challenge of consumer acceptance is not being properly built into the market expectations for Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.
The challenge of consumer acceptance is not being properly built into the market expectations for Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.
All that said, these are really innovative products that have come along way from the frozen veggie burgers of your hippie grandma’s patchouli-filled natural food store. The recipes are very complex. They “bleed.” In common, they have numerous functional ingredients to mimic the flavor and mouthfeel of meat, including natural flavors, coconut oil and soy protein. There are 18 & 21 ingredients for the Beyond Burger & Impossible Burger respectively.
The consumer challenges are no less complex. Is this a meat or a vegetable? Why does it ‘bleed’ if vegetables don’t have blood? Do I have to keep the product refrigerated? Is it safe to eat raw? Do Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat understand their consumer as well as their soy protein? Both companies have reformulated their burgers this year, meaning that they are starting to.
Neuro-Sensory Science & Food Choice
Food choice is the act of making decisions about our consumption. To understand consumers’ food choices we need to understand how choices are encoded in memory. Our brain creates ‘object representations’ of food items to be stored and recalled like data on a thumb drive. The object representation contains both intrinsic factors — our memory of the sensory characteristics of the food, such as sweetness, juiciness, texture, how it was cooked, etc., and extrinsic factors — context — including who we were with, where we were, was it raining and who made it. Also included as an intrinsic factor is how the person felt overall at that time.
Every time we need to recall the memory of ‘hamburger’ — we recall the object representation, reinterpret it in the current context, and then update the object in memory with new information, if needed. The update process happens continually, such that my own object memory of a hamburger includes all of the past well cooked and terribly cooked hamburgers I’ve eaten, all the past emotions I felt, every backyard BBQ I’ve eaten a burger at and everyone who I was ever with. At any given memory update and recall event, information is weighted for salience to the event. A childhood trip to McDonald’s may not be important to my immediate choice of what kind of cheese I want on a homemade burger today, but it might be critically important if someone asks me what my favorite burger is.
Let’s look at two examples. Do you have any food aversions? When I was a child I got really nauseated and ill shortly after consuming spaghetti… to this day I associate such negative physical feelings with the memory (object representation) of the noodles, that I will never enjoy spaghetti noodles, no matter how objectively well they are prepared.
Second example: Have you had the experience where the memory of a long-dormant food craving is better (sometimes MUCH better) than the item itself? This often happens with childhood memories of food. For me it was a favorite childhood chocolate chip cookie flavored cereal. I purchased a box a few years ago and it tasted terrible to my adult-self. Using the object-representation model, I recalled the item, including the feelings I had as a child when I consumed it. This created the expectation that I will experience all of the joy of consumption that I remember experiencing as a child. Then, after consuming it, I interpret the current experience (tastes terrible!) and update the memory with the new information. This update ruined my childhood memory of this cereal because it is now updated with my adult-self flavor experience. What happened? The immediate context and my built up food experiences have changed (including now having formal culinary training), and my emotional relationship to the world is very different as an adult, so it follows that my evaluation of the cereal is different (let’s assume that the cereal recipe didn’t change).
This model of food memory and emotion teaches us three things:
1. Our interpretation of a given eating experience includes includes extrinsic factors, intrinsic factors, and memory.
2. Stored food memories are recalled as needed, reinterpreted & updated with new information.
3. Emotions are the interpretation of the sensations experienced during this process.
Sensory Science & Plant-based Meat
…for there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. -Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Our decisions, our emotions, our feelings, memories, likes and dislikes start with sensory experiences and sensory science measures and interprets the human sensory experience. I break the sensory experience into three main components: 1) the expectation (pre-consumption), 2) the sensory experience (what is perceived) and 3) the response (post consumption).
Sensory science and consumer research tools provide the ability to decompose this expectation — evaluation — re-calibration process and fully understand what it takes to create a product to generate specific human outcomes — delight, satisfaction, surprise etc. — and further to link these outcomes to purchase behavior.
But does this matter for plant-based meat? YES. We have case studies already.
Meat holds a particular cultural significance with us: the carnal nature of Human’s role as apex species, using fire to prepare fresh meat to ensure survival of family and friends. We (in the US) have rituals around hamburgers, from Backyard BBQs, to special spice blends to the specific cut of meat, grind size and cheese to use. Similarly, there’s an entirely different culture around vegetable based products including expectations for nutrition, flavor and how/where to purchase and consume.
Impossible Foods soft-launched their product in 2016. Their press release stated their product strategy: “The Impossible Burger looks, cooks, smells, sizzles, and tastes like conventional ground beef…” Then, in 2019, they reformulated it to reduce calories, saturated fat and sodium. The product now also contains ~30% less protein than ground beef.
What happened? Recall the neuroscience of it. Their consumers have an object representation for hamburgers and an object representation for vegetable-based burgers. Impossible Foods assumed that you could substitute vegetable protein into the food experience of a consumer who’s memory and current expectation is solely based on meat being ‘real.’ This substitution included all of the nutritional liability of real beef (sodium and saturated fat especially). We now know that consumers expect and want something different than a perfect mimic of their beef; they want the products to be healthier, more like veggie burgers. These differences need to be taken into account with both the product, consumer and marketing strategies.
With these most recent reformulations, the products are shifting a bit more towards a bleeding veggie product and less like replicated meat. The consumer expectation for a product like this is uncharted territory and understandably a bit confusing — after all if a consumer perceives one of the burgers more like a veggie burger than plant-based meat, then the act of ‘bleeding’ seems like a liability.
All of this is to say that there are consumer problems. I do not believe the hype that $8B valuations and the rapid rise of BYND is based on a product that has found it’s consumer need and that need is worth (if valued at 2x revenue) $4B/yr in revenue, at least not for awhile. The expected upcoming Impossible Foods IPO will be telling.
The good news for everyone is that these are solvable problems. Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the de facto leaders of this new market, should be segmenting this market and creating products that uniquely target different consumer expectations and needs, as opposed to the current one size fits all approach. They, or their competitors, should be seeking to understand what it is about these ideas that are engaging consumers and ensure current or new product formulations meet those expectations. The result is that consumers of all types and affinity towards both real and plant-based meat should have lots of options as these products proliferate. Enter capitalism — the ones that solve the consumer equation the best will thrive.
Personally, I’m hoping for a real meat burger with blended in plant-based meat to lessen the environmental impact while satisfying my own attachment to real meat.
What are you hoping for ?
Much of what I wrote about is inspired by the foundational research of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory of Dr. Lisa Barrett at Northeastern University, and food application work of Dr. Betina Piqueras-Fiszman’s lab at Wageningen.
I founded MNC in order to help organizations of all sizes and stages approach consumer research, food choice and especially taste tests with the best scientific design matched with the needs of the modern, connected organization and consumer. I have numerous scientific publications and presentations but am most proud of helping bring new thinking to marketing and R&D organizations. Prior to MNC, I both matriculated and taught at the Culinary Institute of America, I lead the sensory team at both a $2B FMCG organization and a small boutique market research firm, and completed a postdoc at the U.S. Army Natick Labs.
