Is India ready for alt-meat? Preferences and willingness to pay for meat alternatives

Little is known about the consumer preferences of next-generation plant-based and cell-based meat alternatives, two food technologies that offer a demand-side solution to the environmental, nutritional, and other societal concerns associated with animal-intensive agriculture. To address this gap, this paper estimates consumers' willingness to pay for four sources of protein (conventional meat, plant-based meat, cell-based meat, and chickpeas) in a developing country with rising demand for meat-India. A latent class model of a discrete choice experiment conducted in Mumbai identifies four heterogeneous segments in the Indian market. Aggregating across all four segments, respondents are willing to pay a premium for plant-based meat and a smaller premium for cell-based meat over the price of conventional meat. However, our main findings show that these premiums strongly differ across the four consumer-class segments. The results offer important insights into future price points and policy options that might make these meat alternatives commercially successful, and therefore, a viable option in addressing societal concerns.