The Alternative Protein Space Doesn't Get People

What’s holding plant-based and blended meat back is misunderstanding why people eat meat in the first place.

Photo by David Schultz on Unsplash

In the effort to reduce the environmental impact of meat consumption, I’ve watched this space swing between extremes for years. First it was plant-based will replace meat. Now it is maybe meat blended with plants will wean people off meat. Beneath all the packaging and positioning, we keep circling back to the same fundamental question: do people actually want to eat this? And if so, why?

Here’s what sits at the center of the maze: people’s relationship with food is far more complex than we give it credit for. We keep trying to solve for rational decision-making when most food choices happen at the intersection of habit, identity, and emotion.

Why People Actually Eat Meat

We often frame meat as a nutrition or emissions problem. But when you ask people directly, the answers are more visceral. A friend told me recently, “I don’t like people messing with my meat. When I eat meat, I want meat.”

That simple statement says more than any report: U.S. meat consumption remains historically high, with USDA projecting only modest shifts through 2026. The baseline hasn't collapsed.

The Plant-Based Plateau

Plant-based meat was supposed to change the story. For a while, it looked like it might. Sales surged during the pandemic. But by the end of 2024, retail sales had slipped, and retailers started trimming assortments. According to SPINS data analyzed by the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat and seafood dollar sales fell 7% to $1.2 billion in 2024, though the category remains above pre-pandemic levels.

Prices remain higher than animal meat, which continues to suppress repeat purchase. The easy-to-reach consumers have been reached. Everyone else needs a better reason.

The Blended Bet

Which brings us to the latest attempt to crack the code: “blended” proteins (sometimes called hybrids). Around 70% meat with 30% plants, or some version of that. The pitch is simple: keep the meatiness, add fiber and plants, maybe cut costs and carbon, then sell it as familiar but better.

The science says it could work. Blended burgers often reduce saturated fat without sacrificing sensory appeal. Studies show blends around the 70/30 range score well on taste and texture. Surveys suggest more than half of consumers would at least try a blended burger.

But here's the catch. In blind tastings, acceptance can be high. Once you reveal that the burger is part meat and part plants, enthusiasm drops. Studies show people often rate hybrids more favorably when they don’t know what’s in them, but demand falls once the blend is disclosed. If you need a disclaimer to explain what’s in your burger, you’ve already lost the plot. Identity matters. People use category cues to decide what something "should" be. If you call it meat, you inherit meat's promises. If you call it meat-plus-plants, you trigger identity filters.

The whole premise can feel patronizing. We need to stop treating meat eaters like toddlers and assuming we have to sneak veggies into their meat to make them eat better. That mindset is exactly what triggers the defensive reactions we keep seeing in the market.

The Flexitarian Mirage

Another misread is the size of the "moveable middle." Surveys sometimes suggest nearly half the country is flexitarian. In practice, a much smaller share is consistently reducing meat. According to Good Food Institute data, 15% of American households purchased plant-based meat or seafood in 2023, and 62% of those households bought it more than once. That sounds encouraging, but it tells us something important: most households aren’t engaging at all, and those that do are not necessarily making it a regular habit.

This suggests that plant-based purchases remain occasional and often tied to specific products rather than a broader dietary shift. People may try a burger they like, or buy something for a recipe or a guest, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into identity-driven behavior. And without that, retention is harder to achieve.

So will blended meat fix this? Maybe in pockets. But if the bet is on people adopting a new identity as “the kind of person who eats blends,” it’s still an uphill climb.

What May Actually Move the Needle

If the goal is reducing the environmental impact of meat consumption, a few strategies stand out more than trying to logic people out of meat.

1. Defaults and choice architecture. When plant-forward or blended options are set as the default in cafeterias, conferences, and workplaces, selection rises sharply. Studies show defaults boost uptake without removing choice. Research from Harvard, UCLA, and other institutions found that plant-based default nudges increased plant-based meal selection by 43-56 percentage points across multiple randomized controlled trials. It works because it doesn't force anyone to become a different person to eat differently today.

2. Sensory parity at a fair price. If a blended or plant-based product costs more or tastes worse than meat, repeat purchase stalls. Close the price gap, raise sensory consistency, and people will buy again. According to Good Food Institute analysis, plant-based meat remained 77% more expensive than conventional meat in 2023, with the price gap actually widening in some categories. Until then, most brands are winning first bites but losing second ones.

3. Smarter blends built on efficiency. This is where companies like Crossover Meats are experimenting. Their approach leans heavily on chicken, a lower-impact protein, and blends it with beef or pork components for flavor and texture. The result is lower in saturated fat, scalable, and marketed as delivering 50% lower land use, water use, and emissions compared to conventional beef burgers.

This framing matters. Not compromise food for guilty carnivores, but better meat that performs on its own terms.

What We Keep Misunderstanding About Meat

At the heart of this is a stubborn misunderstanding. We think people eat meat because they haven’t seen the right data. In reality, people eat meat because it is embedded in family rituals, sports, late nights, and the muscle memory of weeknight cooking.

If you want to change that, stop marketing products in ways that ignore these realities and start designing around them. That looks like defaults that make plant-forward paths the easiest option. It looks like relentless work on taste and consistency. It looks like pricing that doesn’t punish someone for making the better choice. And yes, it looks like blends that deliver on flavor and impact, not half-confessions about carbon.

The signal from the market isn’t that the mission is doomed. It’s that the next wave wins when it stops treating people like problems to fix and starts creating food that fits the way people actually live and eat.