STUDY: Marketing can affect our attitudes and willingness to eat lab-grown meat

When cultured meat is framed as a cutting edge, high-tech product, it is less appealing to consumers than when it is framed as a solution to societal problems, or when it was framed as the same as conventional meat.

SUZANNAH LYONS: ‘You’re standing at the butcher’s counter in a supermarket in the not too distant future and you’re faced with some new options. Do you select the meat product that is better for animals and the environment? The high-tech version made in a state-of-the-art laboratory? Or the product that tastes like conventional meat? (Hint: they’re all the same product.)

Lab-grown meat, cultured meat, cell-based meat, in-vitro meat and clean meat are some of the names given to meat produced directly from animal cells, rather than as part of a living animal. While it’s not yet being produced commercially, the promise of this product is that it could allow us to continue to eat the meat we enjoy while reducing some of the downsides of conventional meat production, like its carbon footprint and impact on animals.

But lab-grown meat is only going to become a supermarket staple if it’s something enough of us want to buy, which is why researchers are looking at how best to market these products to us now. In a new study, published in Frontiers in Nutrition, researchers surveyed 480 adults in the US on their attitudes towards lab-grown meats, and what effect presenting these products in different ways had on their attitudes towards them and willingness to eat them.

“We found that when cultured meat was framed as a cutting edge, high-tech product, this was less appealing to consumers than when it was framed as a solution to societal problems, or when it was framed as the same as conventional meat,” said study lead author Christopher Bryant of the University of Bath. Overall, nearly 65 per cent of the respondents were willing to give cultured meat a try. But the people to whom it was presented to as a high-tech product were less likely to consider it safe, healthy or good for environment. This meant they were 14 per cent less likely to be prepared to try it…

The research confirmed earlier findings about people’s attitudes towards lab-grown meat, said Clive Phillips, a University of Queensland animal welfare and ethics expert who was not involved in this study. “The US study showed that the respondents were quite willing to try in-vitro meat but they were most concerned about its unnaturalness, and I think we would see that here in Australia as well,” Professor Phillips said’. SOURCE…

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