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Tag: marketing professor

  • ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

    ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

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    Several years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet. Besides, it would be easy: The rise of plant-based meat alternatives, offered by companies such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, made it a breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge. I could have my burger and eat it too.

    Or so I thought. Meat alternatives, I found, cost more than their conventional counterparts and are made with complicated ingredients that raise doubts about their healthiness—and even then, taste just okay. Other people have had similar concerns, part of the reason the popularity of those products has declined in recent years to such a degree that Beyond Meat is reportedly now in “survival mode.” But beyond the meat aisle, the “plant-based” label lives on in virtually every food product imaginable: instant ramen, boxed mac and cheese, Kraft singles, KitKat bars, even queso. You can now buy plant-based peanut butter. You can also wash your hair with plant-based shampoo and puff on a plant-based vape.

    Queso made from cauliflower instead of milk is correctly described as plant-based. But if peanut butter is vegan to begin with, then what is the point of the label? And who asked for plant-based liquor? On packaging and ad copy, plant-based has been applied to so many items—including foods that are highly processed, or those that have never contained animal ingredients—that it has gotten “diluted to nothing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa who studies food, told me.

    Technically, plant-based does have a clear definition. The Cornell University biochemist Thomas Colin Campbell is often credited for coining the term in the 1980s as a neutral, less fraught descriptor for diets considered “vegan” or “vegetarian.” That is what made plant-based a popular term for companies eager to sell their meat replacements to a wide range of eaters. The Plant Based Foods Association uses essentially the same criteria—foods made from plants that do not contain animal products—to determine which products can bear its “Certified Plant Based Seal.”

    Some companies describe products as “plant-based,” however, even if they don’t meet these criteria. Items sold as such include foods that have always been vegan, such as prepackaged jackfruit, and those mixed in with some animal products, such as Wahlburgers’ “Flex Blend” patties. But even a product that is properly described as “plant-based” might mean different things to different people, because there is no one reason to try and avoid the consequences of animal rearing and consumption. Health is the leading one, followed by environmental and ethical concerns, Emma Ignaszewski, the associate director of industry intelligence and initiatives at the Good Food Institute, told me.

    The label’s vagueness has been a marketer’s dream, creating an enormous opportunity to capitalize on the perceived virtuousness and healthiness of eating plant-based. Brands use the “plant-based” label to “draw people’s attention to the aggregate goodness of a particular product” and simultaneously “deflect attention” from any less appealing attributes, Joe Árvai, a professor of psychology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California, told me. Some, like coconut water, are relatively good for you; others, like booze, are probably not. And their environmental benefits remain murky: Using fewer animal ingredients generally decreases emissions, but the climate impacts are not always straightforward.

    In this way, the evolution of plant-based mirrors that of organic or gluten-free. These terms have specific meanings that are legitimately useful for helping people make choices about their food, but they have been overused into oblivion. You can now buy organic marijuana and gluten-free water along with your plant-based energy drinks. With multiple labels, including gluten-free, plant-based, GMO-free, Earth-friendly, and Fair Trade, “some products look like a NASCAR” vehicle, Lang said. “You’re just putting buttons all over the place, trying to get my attention.”

    We may have already hit peak “plant-based.” According to a recent survey from the Food Industry Association, there is substantial confusion about what the label means—and that could be discouraging people from buying plant-based products. Some are now outright skeptical of the label. A 2023 study co-authored by Árvai suggested that people are less likely to go for foods described as “plant-based” (or “vegan”) compared with those called “healthy” or “sustainable.” One reason may be negative associations with plant-based meat alternatives, which are seen as “artificial” because of their ultra-processed nature, co-author Patrycja Sleboda, an assistant professor of psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York, told me.

    Another may be that consumers are not sure whether “plant-based” foods are healthy. Americans may respond better when the actual benefits of the food are highlighted, she said. Similarly, market research conducted by Meati, a company that sells meat alternatives made of mushrooms, found that the “plant-based” label, applied to food, signaled “bad eating experience, bad flavor, bad texture, poor nutrition, too many ingredients, and overprocessing,” Christina Ra, Meati’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me.

    Some good may still come out of the messiness of “plant-based” everything. Meati deliberately avoids the label altogether, opting instead to highlight the contents of its products (“95 percent mushroom root”). A recent Whole Foods report predicted that in 2024, consumers will want to “put the ‘plant’ back in ‘plant-based’” by replacing “complex meat alternatives” with recognizable ingredients such as walnuts and legumes. In a particular literal interpretation of this prediction, the company Actual Veggies sells a greens-and-grains patty called “The Actual Green Burger.” And some milk alternatives are also now skipping “plant-based” and simplifying their ingredient lists to just two items (nuts and water).

    Shoppers just want to know what’s in their food without having to think too hard about it. Plant-based hasn’t helped with that. Even Campbell, after he coined the term, acknowledged that it was a limiting, potentially misleading phrase that left too much room for unhealthy ingredients, such as sugar and flour. Perhaps shoppers’ exasperation with the vagueness of “plant-based” eating may eventually lead brands to promote more plant-based eating: that is, just eating plants.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • The Woolly-Mammoth Meatball Is an All-Time Great Food Stunt

    The Woolly-Mammoth Meatball Is an All-Time Great Food Stunt

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    On Tuesday, two men at a museum in the Netherlands lifted a black sheet off a table to reveal a cantaloupe-size globe of overcooked meat perspiring under a bell jar. This was no ordinary spaghetti topper: It was a woolly-mammoth meatball, created by an Australian lab-grown-meat company called Vow.

    The meatball, made using real mammoth DNA, supposedly smelled like cooked crocodile meat, and in press photos, it looked oddly furry, like it had been coughed up by a cat or rolled around by a dung beetle. Still, meat from a long-extinct behemoth that lived during the Ice Age—how could I not want to try it? Although some on Twitter were clearly grossed out, many others were also intrigued. “Bet it tastes better than Ikeas,” one user wrote.

    Disappointingly, the meatball was not made for consumption. Because it contains proteins that haven’t been eaten in thousands of years, the scientists who made it aren’t sure it would be safe. It was a marketing ploy cooked up by a creative agency that worked with Vow. I eventually realized that I wanted the meatball for the same reasons I wanted the Doritos Locos Taco, KFC’s Double Down Sandwich, and Van Leeuwen’s ranch-flavored ice cream: sheer, dumb novelty. This was stunt marketing 101 applied to the future of food, and I was the sucker falling for it.

    Food marketers have made an art of using stunt foods to draw attention to brands and court new audiences. Starbucks’s unhinged Unicorn Frappuccino begged to be Instagrammed; Buffalo Wild Wings chicken coated with Mountain Dew–infused sauce pandered to anyone who has ever experienced the late-night munchies. Typically unexpected, funny, or edgy, stunt foods are “pure marketing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa, told me. They work because they’re bonkers enough to break through the noise of social media and get people talking, he said. But so far, they have caught our attention by twisting familiar items. Lab-grown meat, and all the permutations of protein it makes possible, is pushing us into a new era of stunt marketing, one involving foods people may have never tried.

    George Pappou, Vow’s CEO and founder, told me that the meatball was meant to “start a conversation about the food that we’re going to eat tomorrow being different from the food that we eat today.” Although the stunt drew attention toward Vow—I am writing this, and you are reading this, after all—the company doesn’t have any products on the market yet, only plans to introduce lab-made Japanese quail to diners in Singapore later this year. So what did it accomplish, exactly? “I don’t think of this one so much as a stunt as a demonstration,” Lang said. “It’s an exaggeration of the physical capabilities of new science.”

    Because lab-grown meat is still meat, just without animal husbandry and slaughter, it’s often held up as the future of sustainable, ethical carnivory. Beef or chicken made in this way probably won’t be widely available at your grocery store anytime soon, but according to an estimate by McKinsey, the industry as a whole could be worth $25 billion by 2030. Lab-grown meat—or “cultivated” meat, as the industry likes to call it—is made by growing animal cells in a large tank until they form a sizable lump of tissue. Then it’s seasoned and processed in much the same way as conventional meat, forming foods such as patties, nuggets, and meatballs. Vow’s meatball was grown from sheep cells that were engineered to contain a short mammoth DNA sequence, sourced from publicly available data. As a result, the cells produced the mammoth version of myoglobin, a protein that contributes to the metallic, “meaty” taste of muscle.

    Theoretically, this process can be used to create meat from any animal whose cells are readily available or whose DNA has been sequenced. Think of DNA as essentially an IKEA manual for building tissue. Even animals whose sequences are incomplete can be partly resurrected: Gaps in the woolly-mammoth DNA were filled in using sequences from elephants, like using Billy-bookcase instructions to build a Kallax shelf. Growing the mammoth meat, in a relatively small amount, was “ridiculously easy and fast,” Ernst Wolvetang, a scientist who worked with Vow, told the Guardian. The same could eventually be said of any type of cultivated meat if the industry can surmount the significant cost and efficiency-related challenges involved in scaling up.

    Imagine the stunts that could be possible then: nuggets for every dinosaur in Jurassic Park, even human meatballs. Already, a few companies besides Vow are pursuing more exotic fare: The New York–based Primeval Foods plans to release cultivated lion burgers, ground meat, and sausages, followed by meat from giraffes and zebras, founder and CEO Yilmaz Bora told me. Diners are always looking for something new, so food “must go beyond the current beef, chicken, and pork dishes and come without the expense of nature and animals,” he said.

    Using stunt marketing to raise awareness about the potential of cultivated meat isn’t a guarantee that people will want to eat those products if they ever become widely available. Sometimes the creations are too gross to even consider seriously, such as Hellmann’s “mayo-nog” or Oscar Mayer’s “cold dogs,” which were, uh, hot-dog-flavored ice-cream weiners on a stick. Yet unlike these stunts, people don’t have the same frame of reference for a meatball made of cultivated mammoth meat. “The risk is that it’s off-putting,” Michael Cohen, a marketing professor at NYU, told me. Or enticing.

    If the mammoth meatball made you think They can do that?, then perhaps it will have done some good. If not, then it was, at the very least, a valid attempt to engage with the science. “The meatball thing was a very well-crafted marketing activity for a product”—lab-grown meat as a category—“that I think is going to have very low adoption,” Lang said. A majority of Americans have “food neophobia,” a reluctance to adopt new foods, he said; many don’t even eat seafood. Still, in the past five months, the FDA granted its first two approvals to lab-grown chicken products, clearing a regulatory pathway for even more cultivated goods. If the technology is ever able to scale, perhaps foods like mammoth meatballs will no longer be seen as a stunt. Eventually, they might just be dinner.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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