Download This PaperWhy Are Fewer Grocery Shoppers Buying Meat? Declining Grocery Sales, Prices, and Cultural Change
68 Pages Posted: 18 Jun 2024
Date Written: May 15, 2024
Abstract
The past decades have seen a number of new policies and food technology businesses concerned with alleviating animal welfare or environmental impacts of animal agriculture. We study whether there is evidence that consumer behavior is changing in parallel by examining real grocery purchases matched with machine-scanned label data. We find that meat consumption has been at its highest in recent years, consistent with prior observations, but we offer the first observational evidence that a growing share of the population is purchasing fewer or no meat items and other animal products. While some of this trend can be explained by changes in the volume of grocery purchases, we suggest that media and generational turnover are further driving this trend. We finally discuss the plausible effects of meat alternatives, finding that they cannot have been a primary driver of this trend and have an unclear effect on meat and animal product consumption.
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