Abstract
Previous research has suggested that the general public is divided over their willingness to consider consuming cultured meat (CM) products. As commercial backing for cultured meat startups increases and the public interest in the US, Europe, and developing countries expands, formally evaluating attitudes to these products will become increasingly important. Willingness to pay (WTP) may provide insight into the level of acceptability of CM products, highlight latent societal preferences, and suggest commercial opportunities. To date, no studies have evaluated the societal WTP for CM products. A cross-sectional internet-based survey was distributed to 300 respondents in the US general population using a survey panel design. The mean age was 30 (range: 18–76), and 47% of respondents were male. We presented respondents with a series of scenarios relating to CM products, framing CM burgers as environmentally friendly vs. as a better alternative to traditional burgers. Prior research has highlighted taste and price as areas of societal concern, but no studies have rigorously evaluated the intersection between these considerations. When CM products were framed as being equivalent in taste to conventional meat, and where their environmental benefits were stressed, respondents were willing to pay significantly more than for a traditional burger ($2.11 vs. $1.00). This WTP jumped to $2.66 when framing the CM burger as the best burger, reflecting a 266% premium that consumers were willing to pay for an appropriately framed CM burger. Framing CM burgers as a better alternative to traditional burgers, rather than focusing on their environmental impact, similarly led to the highest desirability ratings. These preferences were also reflected in a contingent valuation discrete choice experiment examining preferences for paying $1 for a traditional burger vs. $2 for a CM burger. These findings support our hypothesis regarding the existence of what we term the gold-standard bias, a cognitive bias that systematically favors a product or service framed as the best available choice over and above its marginal benefit, and has significant and broad implications for feasibility, pricing, and marketing, suggesting the need for further research in this area.
Highlights
METHODSCultured meat (CM) has been the subject of increased interest and scrutiny over the past several years, as several commercial startups have worked aggressively to move the product from the laboratory to the factory and consumer (Post, 2012)
Aside from the intense media interest sparked by cultured meat (CM) development (Goodwin and Shoulders, 2013; Laestadius and Caldwell, 2015), the need for alternative pathways for meat production have been spurred by a complex range of market forces, including increasing global demand for meat—a function of both the rising middle class in emerging markets such as China and increased social pressures for meat consumption as a marker of wealth—as well as concerns related to the environmental impact of traditional beef production in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water use that may possibly be ameliorated by CM (Tuomisto and Teixeira de Mattos, 2011; Mattick et al, 2015a,b)
In this first study evaluating societal Willingness to pay (WTP) for CM hamburgers, we found that the majority of respondents were willing to pay more for CM hamburgers than traditional hamburgers; while this willingness was more pronounced when framing CM burgers as the best available option, it persisted even when framing these burgers as environmentally friendly
Summary
Cultured meat (CM) has been the subject of increased interest and scrutiny over the past several years, as several commercial startups have worked aggressively to move the product from the laboratory to the factory and consumer (Post, 2012). Few studies have attempted to tease out the importance of framing CM products in developing public acceptance, despite the acknowledgment that how CM is described may have a marked impact on public responses (Bryant and Barnett, 2018), though one recent study examined whether providing information on CM impacted taste preferences (Rolland et al, 2020) and others have addressed the importance of positive framing (Bryant and Barnett, 2020) This is a key lacuna, as there is a wide behavioral economics literature that highlights the ways in which framing can affect acceptability, for novel technologies. The best-tasting framing was presented as follows: “Imagine that a company has created a way to make the best hamburgers in the world by culturing the meat cells from the world-famous Wagyu beef These burgers can be available to everyone and taste better than anything out there. Statistical analyses were performed using Stata 13 for Mac (College Station, Texas)
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