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E273: Feeding innovation by taste testing alternative proteins

E273: Feeding innovation by taste testing alternative proteins

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As someone who's been mostly vegetarian for a number of years, I have tried a lot of plant-based foods and there's a variety of them. And so how do they really taste, not just from my perspective? Well, it's really important to do really careful analysis, and this is going to be the subject of our conversation today. Plant-based foods are becoming increasingly healthier and cheaper. But one large question really remains for consumers. How do they taste. NECTAR, a nonprofit initiative on a mission to accelerate the alternative protein transition sets out to answer this question. Through large scale blind taste tests with thousands of consumers. NECTAR is amassing the largest publicly available sensory database on alternative protein products. In its latest report, Taste of the Industry 2025, NECTAR conducted blind sensory panels of 122 products across 14 categories and uncovered which products have achieved the taste that's on par with their animal-based counterparts. Today we talk with NECTAR's Director, Caroline Cotto, about which products are meeting and exceeding consumer taste expectations and what the alternative protein industry needs to do to get more products to this level. And how NECTAR's novel dataset can be used to get there faster. Interview Summary I understand you've conducted the world's largest clinical sensory test for plant-based and alternative meats compared to real animal meat. Tell me about how you conducted this study and why NECTAR is focused on this research. Absolutely. So, for us, we're really focused on this research because we know that taste is a major purchase driver for consumers and it's often the key reason people cite for not repurchasing plant-based meats once they've purchased them. We really want people to come back to the category and so in order for that to happen, we need taste to be where consumers expect it to be. As you mentioned, we set out to conduct a large study and sort of understand where the products on the market taste today. So, we tested 122 products across 14 categories. And we chose those categories by looking at the highest volume selling categories of animal meat, and then mapping the plant-based products to those categories. And then 43 of those products were from Europe as well. So, we were trying to get a real landscape analysis. Different than traditional sensory testing, we conducted all of our studies in restaurant settings to give a more natural experience for the participants. And all of our testing is done with omnivore consumers. So, we love vegans and vegetarians, but we're really trying to go after that hardcore meat eater and see if we can get them to switch because they love the taste of these products. And then the other difference is that we serve everything in what we call a full build. We serve burger patties and buns, hot dogs and buns. We really allow consumers to apply condiments as long as they do it equally across all of the products that they're testing, um, to give that authentic experience as they would experience the product in their own kitchen. And we ended up having 2,684 participants in this city. Each product was tried by a minimum of 100 consumers. Wow, that's pretty extensive. What were some of the surprising results of this? Yeah, I think we found that the average plant-based product was not quite ready for mainstream adoption. The average plant-based product was generally disliked more frequently than the animal product was, with 35% of tasters rating the product. Some form of dislike. And only 9% of tasters rating animal products as some form of dislike. That said, we did find 20 products out of the 122 that were worth celebrating. We created the Tasty Awards based on this data. And we set a threshold for top performance. And that threshold was that of the people that tried the product, if at least 50% of them said that it, that plant-based meat was the same or better than the animal meat that it was considered a winner product in this study. I'm super exciting to see that we saw 20 products meet that threshold. However, these products were not distributed equally across categories. Some categories had up to five products that met the winner threshold and other categories had none. And we also found that no products in this year's study actually achieved parody with animal meat. So, four products came very close, and we're expecting that in next year's study, that there will be some products that achieve that milestone. But we're not there quite yet. And then lastly, we found that there really is a correlation between great taste and financial return. So, we found that the plant-based products that perform best in our sensory tests are actually capturing 50% more market share than the average products in that category. And the categories that taste better are capturing more market share than the lower performing categories. Wow. That's really fascinating and there are lots of ways of sort of thinking through...

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