The year is 2026, and despite years of efforts to encourage people to eat less meat, global consumption continues to rise. Chicken consumption is increasing in many countries, and while sales of red meat have generally declined, overall meat consumption remains stubbornly high. Predictions indicates that this upward trend is likely to continue in the coming years.
This is a daunting challenge for anyone interested in building a sustainable food system. Over the past decade, efforts to change our diet toward a more plant-based one, from plant-based burgers to imitation of meatpromotional campaigns pulses and pulses, new food technologies, menu update, sustainable labels, recipe innovationand even restaurants with a test the default choice of plant foods.
Researchers have also systematically studied many of these approaches to find out what works best, with some clear and promising examples began to emerge. Increase existence plant-based options increase their choice because these options are more visible, more attractive and easier to choose. In some cases, change defaults so that plant-based foods are the standard option, they can also have surprisingly large effects. Overall, evidence is increasingly showing that the food environment that surrounds us affects our diet more than we realize.
Distinctive requirements
However, there is a practical reality to transitioning the food system that is often overlooked by researchers and advocates. It’s the fact that most food companies are unwilling to significantly reduce meat offerings or replace them entirely with plant-based alternatives.
When asked why, their answer is usually simple: consumers want meat, and they’re just responding to that demand in a competitive industry. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable objection. People to do they want meat. However, hidden within this statement is an assumption that is often overlooked: that meat-eaters represent a single, relatively homogeneous group, all of whom have similar motivations, preferences, and barriers to change, while psychological evidence suggests otherwise.
Public debate about dieting, especially those who play it Social mediaoften creates the impression that there are only two meaningful groups of consumers – the devoted vegan and the devoted meat lover. Actually, both segments represent relatively small parts of the population. For example, only about 5% of people identify as vegetarian or vegan, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, only 10 to 15% are meat lovers and have little interest in changing. The views of these two vocal minorities tend to dominate and polarize the meat reduction conversation, but neither group represents the views of the vast majority.
Medium Character
The most important group actually sits between these two poles, occupying what might be called “the middle of the will.” These are consumers who don’t want to eliminate meat entirely, but want to choose vegetarian meals, experiment with alternative proteins, or simply reduce meat portion sizes. Individually, these changes may seem modest, but collectively they add up and have the potential to create significant changes in the population’s consumption patterns.
And it is with this ready medium that there is now the most opportunity for change. Thus, it is clear that understanding their psychology is very important. Researchers are increasingly examining the psychological factors that influence the reduction of meat and protein alternatives adoption over the last few years, with dozens of studies now available identify distinct consumer segments. Together, this work examines more than 50 different psychological and behavioral variables commonly used to profile people, including meat supplement, environmental concerns, food neophobia, health motivations, personal identity and so on.
However, despite these differences, a surprisingly consistent picture of several key common segments emerges. There are always two clear poles of vegetarians and meat lovers, while in between they represent a much more nuanced group. Breaking down this middle, we see some consumers who resemble what we call optimizers. They are motivated by health, foodefficiency, quality and diversity of their food. These people are often willing to reduce their meat consumption if it suits them personally goals. Other consumers are more concerned about food-related issues. Their choice is usually based on values and mostly based on habit, familiarity and convenience. The third group consists of pragmatists, who care about taste, quality, availability and practicality. They may be perfectly willing to eat less meat, but only if the alternatives meet these basic requirements.
What works, for whom?
All of these groups can be encouraged to change their diet in the same direction, they just require different forms of motivation to get them there. This finding highlights one of the main limitations of current approaches to diet change, which approach works best on average. But the average effect can hide important differences between people.
For example, an optimizer may respond positively to information about nutrition, protein quality, or health outcomes, while a disengaged consumer may never read that information in the first place, but can be influenced by making plant options more visible and appealing. A pragmatist may care less about environmental benefits and focus instead on whether the food tastes good and represents good value for money or is discounted or promoted.
This raises an important question for changing the food system. Rather than asking which interventions work, we should also ask which programs work for whom. Initial evidence suggests this tailoring interventions to different consumer profiles can produce larger effects than generic approaches, a finding consistent with other areas of behavior change where individualized approaches often outperform one-size-fits-all strategies.
The challenge, then, is not just to try to find the best behavior change intervention or a “silver bullet,” but to understand the psychological diversity that exists within a population and design interventions that work with that change. If we identify who people are, what motivates them, and what barriers they face, we can move toward a smarter approach to food system transitions that align with the right strategy for change at the right time.
