In the face of the fight against climate change, increasingly more people are modifying their diets, abandoning or limiting traditional sources of protein, primarily derived from beef, pork, poultry and dairy products.
In their place, consumers are opting for goods with a lower environmental impact, the so-called Alternative Protein Foods (APF), whose sources include legumes, algae, mushrooms, shellfish, and insects, which are gaining in popularity.
However, while Europe is the leading market for the production and sale of APF products, and research on them appears regularly in scientific journals, what has been missing until now is a snapshot of the differences in attitudes toward alternative protein sources across countries.
Two researchers from Warsaw’s University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS), along with experts from Germany, Denmark, Greece, Norway, and Italy, decided to fill this gap.
Together, they analyzed 25 publications (covering 18 European countries) from 11 peer-reviewed journal databases. They posted the results in the
Food Quality and Preference journal.
The research shows that consumers from Poland and the Czech Republic show a relatively high reluctance and ‘low readiness’ to buy APFs compared to their Western neighbors. The trend is especially clear among those aged 50 and above.
Moreover, so-called “food innovators” (people who buy innovative food products as soon as they are introduced to the market) and “early observers” (people who buy them willingly but after thinking about them beforehand) account for only a quarter of all young consumers in Poland, while in some Western countries the number exceeds 70%.
“These patterns need to be taken into account in the context of permanently high per capita consumption of meat (compared to legumes) between 2018 and 2020 in countries such as Poland,” said Hanna Zaleskiewicz, a psychologist at SWPS University and one of the publication’s co-authors.
Further analysis also showed that products in which insects are a source of protein arouse the greatest reluctance among consumers.
The study was conducted as part of the international project “LIKE-A-PRO:. From niche to mainstream - alternative proteins for everybody and everywhere,” funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe program.
