“Research report: modern alternative proteins did not replace meat purchases in restaurants” by Jared Winslow, Jayisha Dhargawe, Seth Ariel Green 🔸, Jacob_Peacock, MMathur🔸, Hailey Sherman

Overview

This post summarizes a new preprint on alternative proteins from the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab: New alternatives, same orders. We investigated 19 restaurants that introduced plant-based alternative proteins throughout 2016 to 2023, including Beyond sausage, the Impossible burger, and many others. We find essentially no evidence here that alternative proteins reduce meat purchases or those of other animal products, even for the same individual customers over time.

Interactive plots here.

Why this matters

A central theory of change for alt proteins is substitution: match meat on taste, price, and convenience, and consumers should replace a majority of their meat purchases with alternatives. EAs, including funders, are excited about this approach as a way of reducing animal suffering and creating a more environmentally sustainable food system. Coefficient Giving recently announced a 10 million dollars R&D fund for making better tasting alt proteins, while the Nova Vista Foundation is investing a further 10 million dollars in policy and market-shaping, which they consider “high EV bets due to their leverage.” There is also a general sense in EA that the animal advocacy movement might be on the verge of a large influx of funding, much of which may go to [...]

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Outline:

(00:17) Overview

(00:52) Why this matters

(04:07) Which alt proteins?

(06:27) What we did

(09:33) Results

(09:59) A1

(13:36) A2

(14:13) A3

(15:00) A4

(15:27) The restaurants in detail

(17:45) Real-world data problems

(19:27) Where do we go from here?

(20:58) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 26th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mebo4NYBmFcfzNRDS/research-report-modern-alternative-proteins-did-not-replace

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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