Decarbonising our diets: How behavioural science can aid our adoption of alternative protein sources

Welcome back to The Behaviouralist’s newsletter! This month we are considering the potential for alternative meats to drastically reduce the environmental impact of our diets. We apply our D-BIAS methodology (Diagnose Behaviour, Intervention design, Assess, Scale-up) to guide our approach to nudging consumer’s dietary choices towards sustainable alternatives.??

What are alternative protein sources and why are they important?

Globally, food production is responsible for more than a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions (Ritchie et al. 2022). The majority of these emissions come from livestock farming. We can decarbonise our diets by eating more alternative protein sources and less animal meat, and this dietary change may even have co-benefits for our health and animal welfare. Alternative protein sources refer to a range of products including:?

• Plant-based meat - Products made from plants that are designed to mimic the taste, texture, and nutritional profile of animal meat.
• Artificial meat - Also known as lab-grown or cell-based meat, this is produced by culturing animal cells in a controlled environment.?
• Novel foods - Foods that do not have a ‘history of consumption’ in a specific territory or that has been made using new technologies and processes, such as fungi, algae, and insects (Food Standards Agency, 2024).

To meet the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) recommendation of a 35% reduction in beef and lamb consumption by 2050 will require substantial dietary changes by individuals (in addition to changes to the food supply system). Meanwhile, although a majority of the UK public say they want to consume less meat, changing the way we eat is not that easy (Eating Better, 2020). Fortunately, behavioural science can help us understand the barriers to dietary change, and inspire evidence-based interventions to achieve it.?

Using D-BIAS to encourage adoption of alternative protein sources

As a first step, conducting qualitative research (e.g., surveys, focus groups, interviews) can reveal the conscious and subconscious attitudes of consumers that impact their food choices, and reveal the barriers to adopting alternative sources of protein that need to be overcome or removed. For example:

• Do people understand the environmental impact of livestock farming and the positive impact that reducing their meat consumption could have? And does this understanding lead to changes in consumption??
• Does the name for protein alternatives matter? Are we more likely to buy “artificial”, “cultivated”, or “lab-grown” meat??
• What influence does price or incentives (e.g. multi-purchase deals or points) have on product selection??
• Should alternatives be displayed on the same aisle as traditional meats, or in their own section?
• Can people be nudged into ordering novel foods through restaurant menu design?

Diagnosing the barriers and drivers of food choices can enable us to design interventions to nudge consumers towards more sustainable choices. Examples of possible interventions are:

• Offer consumers’ incentives to try alternative protein products, such as “buy one animal meat product and get an artificial meat product at half price”.
• Provide information about the environmental or health impact of each option via product labels.?
• Alter the choice architecture of supermarkets and restaurant menus to make alternative proteins more salient and accessible.?
• Behaviourally segment customers (based on their current diet and their attitudes towards artificial and animal meats) to receive targeted digital advertising.

It is vital to test interventions to be confident they will be effective, and to identify possible counterproductive or spillover effects. For instance, it’s possible that if consumers feel they are getting a “deal” by paying half price for the artificial meat product when they buy a full price animal meat product, they might upgrade from chicken to beef, but the latter is nine times more carbon-intensive to produce than the former (Ritchie et al. 2022). Or they may feel that having reduced their consumption of animal meats, they have a moral licence to care less about plastic packaging on other products.?

There are various methodological approaches that can be used to assess potential interventions before they are scaled up. One method is to re-create an online marketplace and simulate a grocery shopping experience whilst including alternative protein products as an option. We can then randomise attributes (such as their name, label, or how saliently they are positioned) to test the impact of these on consumer choice. This method is realistic without requiring an expensive field trial, and can produce results that inspire the confidence to scale-up interventions.?

We are experienced in using this method. We worked with Open Banking to simulate an online marketplace to test whether displaying consumers’ bank balance at the point of purchase would impact their purchase behaviour, as well as recreating a mobile banking application to test the effectiveness of in-app warnings at preventing consumers from falling for scams. We also partnered with Which?, recreating a major online retail platform in order to explore the effects of online fake reviews on consumer choice.?

Changing dietary behaviour through the adoption of alternative protein sources will be a vital step to reducing decarbonising food production, and is an area where behavioural science can add great value. We are excited to explore this topic further through our work and contribute with research that can inform behaviour change in this field.

More of our work

Read this month’s blog post on encouraging heat pump adoption

Experts believe that heat pumps represent the future of low-carbon heating and cooling, but less than one per cent of households currently own one. Our latest blog post explores the barriers to heat pump adoption in the UK, and proposes behaviourally-informed strategies to overcome these.?

Learn about how we applied behavioural science to understand apprenticeship dropouts

We worked with ACT Training Ltd , the largest apprenticeship provider in Wales, to conduct a behavioural diagnosis to understand the reasons for dropouts in apprenticeship programmes. We also held workshops with ACT employees to embed knowledge of behavioural science into the organisation. Learn more about our work with ACT through the link below.

Watch our first Behavioural Insights in Practice webinar

Thank you to everyone who attended our first Behavioural Insights in Practice webinar earlier this month, where Senior Behavioural Scientist Filippo Muzi-Falconi presented The Waste Game - an educational tool we developed in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ireland and the Irish Universities Association to improve waste prevention and recycling behaviours at universities across Ireland. We have now made a recording of the webinar available on our youtube channel!

Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter! We hope you found it interesting! As always, if you have ideas for us to work together or would simply like to chat to us, don’t hesitate to get in touch.