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Internal study on meat replacements on the example of vegetarian nuggets

More and more meat substitute products are entering the market. We were curious to see how well these products from established brands would perform in comparison to each other. To do this, we conducted a Central Location Test with 5 different vegetarian/vegan nuggets and 80 test subjects. Our goal was to find out preference (overall, taste, appearance, consistency), non-meat recognition among children, and final preference. The results of this internal study were very surprising to us because there were huge differences in performance. We found that certain brands stood out and were liked by most people, while some, unfortunately, could do better to be liked by the public.

Würden Ihre Kinder erkennen, dass das keine Fleisch Nuggets sind

Finding 1

Taste & consistency - drivers of success for alternative meat replacements

First of all our study showed, that for most people taste and consistency are the most important drivers of liking while appearance is less important. This finding is very important when setting a focus of further product developments. 

There are huge differences between different brands of meat substitutes

Finding 2 

Huge differences between the tested brands for plant-based products

Another result of our study is that not all brands are performing equally good. Even though we tested leading brand available at the common stores all over Germany, some products performed very badly and should consider further improvements in order to be able to keep up with the competitive firms. Also, the saying "Nobody is Perfect" can also be applied in the context of meat replacement products, because even the best brands did not get a perfect rating and can still be further improved in the future.

If you want to know if your brand was part of the study and how well it performed, feel free to get in touch with us and we are happy to give you more details about or findings. 

Kids are unlikely to discover a difference between vegetarian nuggets and meat nuggets

Finding 3

Good vegetarian products will unlikely be uncovered by children 

We asked all test subjects who are either parents oder grandparents for their assessment if their children or grandchildren would realize the fact that the nuggets are not made from meat but are a vegetarian/vegan alternative. Surprisingly, 83% claimed that their children or grandchildren would not notice a difference. 

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More Information

Get full access to our study on alternative meat replacements

If you want to get deeper insights into our study and want to see which brands succeeded and which were not liked by our test subjects - just get in touch with us, book a meeting with our experts and get full access and all the details of this survey! Our experts are looking forward to discuss our findings with you. 

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