Social and disruptive innovation strategies for alternative proteins

Summary: Despite decades of advocacy, traditional approaches to reducing meat consumption—vegan promotion, donation "offsets," and developing cheaper, tastier alternative proteins—have seen limited success, with vegetarianism stagnating around 2% globally. This post argues that the primary barrier is not culinary but social: the cost of standing out and the identity discontinuity of publicly changing one's values. Drawing on Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation theory and Tesla's success repositioning electric vehicles as aspirational rather than sacrificial, I propose a demand-side strategy that transforms plant-based food from a social liability into a social asset—making veggies cool and trendy rather than competing on cost and convenience. Companies like Oatly and Heura already demonstrate that this approach can work. With transformative AI poised to accelerate both content creation and food innovation, the timing is favourable for animal welfare funders to explore this strategy.

Epistemic status: probably people have already considered this, but I have not seen it properly explored or articulated.

Strategies for a more compassionate world with animals

Animal welfare is one of the usual 3 top causes in effective altruism, but it can also be one of the most frustrating ones. Despite many wins in the last decade or two, more meat is produced now than ever before. It is also a problem where many people around us take an active part in funding.

Early animal welfare advocates actively tried to convince people to go vegan. This is an appealing strategy: not only is it a boycott of the meat industry, but it also serves as a form of social protest and directly reduces the number of animals killed. Sadly, despite much effort, the rates of veganism and vegetarianism have remained at around 2% (with the well-known exception of India).

As a result of this, practically minded animal welfare advocates have recently switched to requesting donations, sometimes labelling such as "offsets" FarmKind. Such donations provide much-needed funds to a movement with historically low resources, and which can be used to fund some of the most impactful interventions we have found so far, like corporate campaigns. Additionally, if donating small amounts is easier than going vegetarian or even reducing meat consumption, represents an easier onramp for people to recognise and contribute to solving the problem. Some have even argued that a world with a minority of vegans supported by a majority of society contributing with donations is the world we can realistically aspire to Aidan Kankyoku, Vegans are monks.

An alternative solution is that of alternative proteins, often sponsored by The Good Food Institute. The theory was that if we managed to create plant-based or clean meat that was (i) cheaper, (ii) tastier and (iii) more convenient than conventional meat, then people would naturally switch to it, and the problem would be solved. I am quite sympathetic to this approach, in part because the ceiling is so much greater than the approaches mentioned in the previous paragraph. However, the success has not been as great as hoped so far, and there is also research showing that the three factors above are not sufficient to convince people, see Faunalytics, When is vegan meat preferable to animal meat?

In this post, I will argue that to make the alternative proteins win, we need to work on the demand side of the equation. This means addressing how people perceive plant-based or alternative proteins.

The thesis

The thesis of this post is that the largest barrier for alternative proteins is not culinary, but social. In the words of Aidan Kankyoku:

People know that the main sacrifice is social rather than culinary; they’re less worried about what they would eat and more about how inconvenient it would be to have limited options when eating out with friends, how their friends and family would tease them, and how it would complicate family dinners at the holidays.

This is sort of obvious in hindsight, but it also explains why the three factors mentioned above are typically not sufficient to convince people. It also highlights why omnivores are quite prolific at coming up with rationalisations for not giving up meat. More concretely, I argue that there are two key, closely intertwined barriers:

1. Social cost: Going vegetarian implies that you will automatically stand out in every social gathering, and importantly, could make everyone feel silently judged by your actions. This is, in a sense, the flip side of the boycott strategy.
2. Identity discontinuity: Adopting veganism implies a change of identity or core values. People going vegan often have to implicitly but publicly recognise that they were not behaving in accordance with their values. It may seem silly, but people like to behave consistently, and this breaks that rule.

The offset strategy smartly avoids both barriers: it does not require people to stand up, and also creates a softer way of switching behaviour.

In this post, I highlight that there is an underappreciated strategy: to try transform plant-based food (or alternative proteins) from a social liability to a social asset. Next, I explain how this could work.

The climate parallelism

Since apparently one can always find a historical movement in the past to justify any strategy James Oz, Why you can justify almost anything using historical social movements, let me justify my strategy with the climate change movement. In the climate change movement have been social protests, offset donations, and campaigns to get politicians to take action. However, perhaps the most successful actions so far have been the development of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.

Within electric vehicles, Tesla has played a key role: they positioned the electric vehicle not as a "sacrifice" for the planet, but as a cool, premium option for tech-savvy and forward-thinking wealthy people. Over a short span of time, Teslas stopped being a social liability (giving up important car features for the climate) and started being a social asset (having a cool car).

The theory: disruptive innovation

To explain why this worked, we should look at the theory of disruptive innovation put forward by Clayton Christensen in its book "The Innovator's Dilemma". In this framework, plant-based or alternative proteins shall play the role of disruptive innovation, while meat plays the role of the incumbent. Clay suggests that disruptive innovation happens when a new product or service addresses a niche, an almost unprofitable market that the incumbent underserves. Then, he argues, with time, the disruptive product improves faster than the user demands, slowly capturing the least profitable segments of the market. This leads the incumbents to move to higher profitable segments until they become uncompetitive and disappear.

Disruptive innovation is not the only type of innovation. There is also sustaining innovation. However, the key difference between them is not the technology. Rather, it is the market they serve. Sustaining innovation addresses the mainstream markets, while disruptive innovation addresses the underserved ones. These are markets that appreciate features different from the mainstream market.

Based on this framework, Clay's examples typically focus on low-end products, such as minicomputers vs mainframes. However, Tesla's example shows that one can also create disruptive innovation from the high-end. While the mainstream market highlighted reliability, affordability and convenience, Tesla focused on social status and coolness. In summary, the features appreciated by the mainstream market are basically equivalent to the three factors emphasised for alternative proteins: cost, taste and convenience. Conversely, the features appreciated by the disruptive market are social status and coolness. I suggest we steal Tesla's strategy and apply it to plant-based or alternative proteins.

The practice: make veggies cool and trendy

With time and innovation, I expect that plant-based or clean meat will be able to make alternative proteins much more attractive and cheap to mainstream consumers. However, right now these are not the features we can leverage. Instead, I think we should focus on making veggies a social asset. This suggests positioning alternative proteins not as an alternative to meat or a personal sacrifice, but as a new category on its own.

For example, we could position plant-based food as a new culinary tradition. We should host family or friend gatherings that showcase the depth of Indian cuisine or the freshness of Mediterranean salads. We can attract experimental chefs to experiment with the new alternative proteins and build foodie communities around plant-based food. From cooking workshops to food festivals to guided cooking in Thermomix devices, we can and should create a rich ecosystem of activities that make plant-based food exciting and fun.

This strategy has many advantages. First, it forces vegetarian advocates to go out and avoid isolation. It is well known that people are much more willing to accept new ideas when those are presented by people they trust. If we make plant-based food something fun, as suggested by a friend, it is much more likely that omnivores will be willing to try it. Importantly, I believe we should put all of our efforts into winning in the social experience.

Second, it provides an easy way to leverage the 2% of vegetarians and vegans effectively, without paying a cost. If vegetarian cooking is a hobby and not a sacrifice, then vegetarians will be happy to share their passion with others and will score social points by doing so.

And third, it directly solves the two barriers I mentioned earlier. It addresses the social cost barrier: there is no social cost if, at the end of a social event, people ask you for the recipe, or if at every gathering your vegetarian dish is the star of the show. The social cost is turned into a social reward. It also addresses the identity discontinuity barrier: people eating vegetarian food will not feel they are accepting that they were doing anything wrong; they are just upgrading their lifestyle.

Companies are already playing this game. For example, Oatly originally won by positioning its products as the best option for coffee lovers (see here). The goal was not to highlight the environmental benefits or make it cheaper than milk, but to craft the perfect barista experience. They crafted an oat milk that foamed well and tasted great in coffee, and they partnered with coffee shops to promote their product. As a result, oat milk became a trendy and desirable product, and sales soared. Their move meant that one can now find oat milk in any supermarket or coffee shop, and many people drink it because they prefer it.

Similarly, Heura -- an amazing plant-based meat company from Barcelona -- has emphasised the social and family aspects of their products, often showing how grandparents (the ultimate guardians of culinary tradition in Mediterranean culture) enjoy and approve their food.

Concrete intervention ideas

For funders and advocates looking to explore this strategy, here are some concrete directions worth investigating:

• Premium experiential dining: Fund pop-up restaurants or tasting events led by renowned chefs that position plant-based cuisine as haute cuisine, not alternative.
• Content creator partnerships: Sponsor food influencers and lifestyle content creators to feature plant-based dishes as aspirational, not activist.
• Culinary education: Support cooking classes and workshops that teach plant-based cooking as a skill and hobby, with emphasis on flavour and technique over ethics. Consider partnerships with culinary clubs or companies like Thermomix's Vorwerk.
• Community building: Create or fund food communities (apps, clubs, events) that bring enthusiasts together around plant-based cooking as a shared interest.
• Product positioning research: Fund R&D into how alternative protein companies can better position their products as premium or novel categories rather than meat substitutes.
• AI cooking assistants: Develop personalised, interactive tools that guide users through plant-based recipes, adapting to preferences, skill level, and available ingredients.
• Restaurant certification: Create a "culinary excellence" rating or curated guides highlighting restaurants with standout plant-based dishes—not just vegetarian restaurants, but any venue doing exceptional work.
• Corporate catering: Partner with catering companies to position plant-based options as the premium choice for office events and client meetings.
• Seasonal campaigns: Develop content and recipes specifically for traditional gatherings (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc.) where family and social context matter most.

Not all of these will work well, but if some do and facilitate adoption, the success will feed into improved alternative protein products, hopefully speeding up the transition away from meat, which may be starting to happen in some places like the Netherlands (see here). 

How this fits in a world with transformative AI

I have always felt that while it is worth anticipating the effect of transformative AI on the animal welfare movement, it is a different problem: a social problem; and only tangentially related to AI.

However, I believe there are at least two ways transformative AI can play to our advantage in this strategy. First, AI will have the most immediate effect in audiovisual production. Thus, it will significantly facilitate the possibility of creating high-quality content for social media or even generating personalised culinary experiences. For example, it should be fairly easy to create AI agents that help people cook amazing plant-based dishes tailored to their preferences or occasions.

In a bit longer horizons, we should expect AI systems to significantly speed up any research needed to make alternative proteins better in almost all fronts. While factory farming still has to go through animals, which are structurally less efficient, alternative proteins have a much higher technological ceiling, and AI should help us reach it faster. 

I think this strategy would thus be amenable to the call put forward in this post: Aidan Aidan Kankyoku, Your Input Needed: Preparing the Animal Movement for AGI.

Conclusion

In summary, I think the animal welfare movement has historically overlooked demand-side strategies that could promote the adoption of alternative proteins. This strategy addresses what is in my opinion, are the main barriers to the adoption of alternative proteins: social cost and identity discontinuity. As in most cases, there is a historical precedent for this strategy to work. Tesla transformed electric vehicles from a sacrifice into a status symbol; companies like Oatly and Heura are already showing this can work for food. If the IPO of Anthropic makes more funding available to the animal welfare movement, I suspect it would be smart to explore how we can exploit this strategy.