“Grilling the myths”: Uncomfortable truths and promising paths in consumer research on plant-based alternatives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The urgent need for a dietary transition away from animal-based foods toward sustainable protein sources is a major focus in sensory and consumer science. Despite growing market availability and increased public interest in alternative proteins, significant barriers remain to achieving meaningful dietary shifts. Building on an invited keynote presented at the 2024 Eurosense conference, this paper critically examines the state of sensory and consumer research on plant-based alternatives. The paper first and foremost highlights the significant gap between consumer expectations and the actual sensory performance of plant-based products, which continues to be the main factor hindering their widespread acceptance. It also addresses key methodological shortcomings in the literature, including the lack of robust sensory methodologies, unrealistic assumptions about substitution potential, an overreliance on intentions rather than actual behavior, and clear sampling biases. Taken together, these factors obscure the substantial challenges facing plant-based alternatives. The interim conclusion is that current evidence does not convincingly demonstrate that these products can substantially replace animal products in our diets. However, it is essential to set realistic expectations. While plant-based alternatives are unlikely to completely displace animal products in the near future, they remain an important part of the solution. The final section highlights promising research avenues, emphasizing the critical role of sensory and consumer scientists in addressing these barriers and driving meaningful progress toward a protein transition. • Critical examination of sensory and consumer research on plant-based (PB) alternatives. • PB alternatives face persistent sensory and non-sensory challenges to market adoption. • Sensory studies of PB alternatives often lack robust benchmarks and methodologies. • PB research has focused primarily on intentions, neglecting actual behavior. • Promising paths forward are reviewed, highlighting sensory science's potential for impact.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it