Something corroborating from Gernmany:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00138-3

Decade-long shift toward vegan meal options as part of dietary transition in German university canteens

Here we show menu and price trends using 3.7 million meal options from 340 German university canteens between 2015 and 2024. Plant-based options (vegetarian, vegan) rose from 63.7% to 70.5% (6.9 observed percentage points; 2.2 predicted percentage points per year). Vegan options increased by 23.1 points overall and 3.7 per year, while vegetarian options declined by 16.3 and 2.1, and meat-based options by 6.0 and 1.7, respectively. Vegan growth coincided more strongly with declining vegetarian than meat-based options, suggesting intra-plant-based replacement rather than direct substitution of animal-based options. Animal-based meals remained more expensive, while prices rose in parallel, suggesting economic factors alone cannot explain the shift.

I...guess this is good? But it really depends on the specifics. As Kenny Torella notes: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian

Germans are eating about the same amount of beef as they were in 2011, but far less pork. But because pigs are large — pigs yield about 124 pounds of edible meat on average in Germany — the steep decline in pork only resulted in a reduction of about one-sixth of a pig per person. However, the 12.5 percent increase in poultry consumption, which looks modest on the chart below, has resulted in almost one extra chicken farmed for each of Germany’s 83 million residents because chickens are so small.

Thanks for sharing the data for the paper. Based on a fairly quick re-analysis, it appears that a decline in selection of chicken can be detected - but as you note, choice of alternative red meats tends to increase slightly, and some of the increase in selecting the new plant-based meat is driven by fewer people selecting the other veg-based options.

A few considerations as a result:

• Could it still be good to reduce purchasing of chicken, given the relatively poorer conditions of chickens and greater animals per kg of meat slughtered to get chicken vs. beef?
• Given some people who seemingly would have eaten the chicken switch to beef when a chicken alternative is on the menu, might some moral self deception be at play? People say they'll eat veggie if only there is a replacement for X. When there is a replacement for X, they can't continue eating X in good conscience but switch to Y, for which they can then say they would eat plant-based if only there were a plant-based Y alternative
  • I wonder if one could see if chicken increases when an explicit replacement for beef and steak were made (or is sofritas already explicitly intended as a replacement for one of these?)
  • I wonder if meat might ultimately decline if there were yet more plant-based explicit alternatives - what do you think?
• It would be particularly interesting to know the 'readiness to change' or 'intention/sympathy' towards vegetarianism - I might expect more sympathetic/genuinely ready to change people really would try the alternative out as opposed to just switching to beef

Finally, what are your thoughts on the ecological validity of the experiment? Naturally, people can't see or smell the options, as you note in the paper, but the experiment also takes place in the absence of repeat visits, advertising, and hearsay about how X or Y tastes really good, has to be tried etc. I'm not totally surprised that just adding an option to the end of a virtual menu doesn't greatly shift behavior, but that also seems a slightly reductionistic model of what plant-based advocates might expect would happen in such a situation, which might be more to do with norm shifting, decreasing difficulty enabling people to switch over time etc. I hope that does not come across as overly critical, because I'm also really pleased to see a rigorous attempt to put ideas to the test and challenge assumptions. [edit: I haven't thoroughly read you paper, so apologies if you already discuss this]

Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It's so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don't like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%. 

Would it be a fair quick take to say that this provides evidence that the veg sofritas and "chicknitas" were simply not something that this audience tended to find attractive (in the hypothetical setting at least) ... But perhaps this was not well powered to detect small proportional substitution effect on the animal products?

The extension one might draw. If that's the case is that if One were to have introduced a more more popular set of plant-based products it remains possible that these indeed would have substituted for the animal products. But we need more data to make this determination.

The fact that the sofritas if I read it right, seem to particularly substitute for chicken is particularly interesting, although I suspect we are underpowered to meaningfully determine whether it substituted more for the beef or the chicken.

Is that a fair quick take? If not, I'll try to revise it and change this comment to avoid distracting people.

👋 we've updated this post to link to the now-published paper:

Hope, J. E., Green, S. A., Peacock, J. R., & Mathur, M. B. (2026). Effects of adding plant-based menu options on meat selection frequency: A randomized controlled experiment. Food Quality and Preference, 105931.

Interesting, but I'm not sure this captures the main potential benefit of adding plant-based meat options. These options improve the experience of being a vegan - thereby increasing takeup/retention of veganism - rather than being appealing to meat-eaters in the moment. I would be way more likely to be vegan if there were vegan meat alternatives everywhere I went (including meat-heavy experiences like Christmas, BBQs, holidays), as opposed to just salad and lentils. Even when they aren't that tasty, the fake meat makes me feel less "left out". 

The fact the fake meat options are displacing the pure vegetable options at all, is a sign that they are improving the experience of being vegan. 

Obviously, this study does still tell us something about how appealing/unappealing vegan meat options are to people, and the results have updated me downwards a bit. But not by a huge amount. I very rarely see my meat-eater friends order vegan options (whether vegetables or fake meat); and I very rarely see my vegan friends break their veganism because there was only a vegetable option rather than a fake meat option. So I think I would have predicted broadly similar results. 

I'll share my view on this as a consumer. Almost every time I see a PMA on a menu, I expect to get the following things if I order that option:

- Smaller quantity
- Worse macros (That is, I expect that the PMA will have a higher fat/carb:protein ratio than chicken breast)
- Often, an upcharge to boot

This expectation might be irrational on my part; an aftereffect of being vegetarian in the 1990s before the current generation of PMAs was released. When I was a full-time vegetarian, I frequently observed restaurant meals for vegetarians contained both less calories and less (sometimes almost no) protein. I guess the upshot of the above is that I believe achieving price- and nutrition- parity would strongly influence me.

Finally, I think I tend to do better at making choices that align with my ethics at the supermarket rather than at restaurants. 

I appreciate y'all studying this and helping us learn more about what we can do to advance plant-based options, and I especially love that it is open access. I do have some questions tho. 

(A) "Despite widespread optimism, simply increasing the number of PMAs on restaurant menus may not consistently reduce meat selection." Is this a reasonable expectation of any new food ingredient? Are there studies that show just adding a new ingredient, any ingredient whether plant-based or not, to a menu would result in uptake of it? 

It seems to me, and I could be missing something, that this study might be studying the habitual nature of consumers, and less so their preferences about plant-based meat. A possible way to have controlled for this would be to have a new animal meat item and see how many people chose it. 

If your general model of consumers, or people generally, is that they are cognitive misers, it seems that model would predict this result regardless if the additional items were plant based or meat based. So the casual factor would be habit, not the kind of protein. That would still be informative for plant-adoption and be a large barrier, but it be saying less about plant-based preferences and more about just needing to do proper UX and marketing. 

(B) I saw y'all did awareness checks on what people thought the point of the study was, but curious why y'all didn't do an awareness check on whether they noticed if there was a plant-based option in the menu or not? Like how many people are taking the time to read the small grey on white text? And with steak or chicken, you don't need to because those are familiar and instantly understood. Without that, it is unclear to me, whether you are testing people's preference for plant-based options or their ability to notice new items. 

The methods of the paper just don't bear any useful relationship to the real world. 

1. this was a survey, not a real pilot where people had to actually spend real money, or had a choice as to whether or not to go to the shop. They could 'decline to order' and notably this was higher in the no PBMA arm.
2. The veggie option in this instance was just the same as the other options without any protein added (albeit 'free guac'). Arguing therefore that people choosing the Plant-based meat one are 'forgoing veggies' is incorrect, if the orders had been real, they would have just had the veggie wrap plus plant protein. 

Even if we assume this survey is a reasonable reflection of real world behaviour, the main thing that jumps out to me is that you can force vegetarians to spend the same amount of money on a wrap that has less in because they are a captive audience, and when you add plant protein, some of those people prefer to have plant-based protein in. 

The most leveraged audience to target with meat reduction is those on board but struggling, not random people out of the blue. Plant-based meat shows clear utility in this, and this study doesn't really undermine that proposition in my view.