Introduction

Concerns are growing about the negative impact of increased meat consumption on human health (IARC, 2015; Willett et al. 2019), the environment (Weis, 2013), and animal welfare (Foer, 2009); in response, meat alternatives are being viewed as a possible solution to these problems. A meat alternative is a food product that is primarily made from plant sources (such as soybeans) and is designed to mimic the taste and texture of meat. While researchers and government research organizations are encouraging the development and promotion of meat alternatives, consumers have been reluctant to embrace them, due to perceived inferior taste, greater cost, and lack of convenience or availability (Bryant, 2019). However, changes in the social environment appear to be shifting consumers’ attitudes toward meat alternatives. Investment in the meat alternatives market is expanding globally, and various startups and large companies have entered the market, both of which have lowered the price and improved the convenience of these products. It has become common to see alternative meat products in burger shops, restaurants, and supermarkets, making meat alternatives more accessible. Additionally, the social momentum to adhere to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015 (United Nations, 2015) is thought to have influenced consumer awareness of alternative products.

In Japan, soybeans (the main ingredient in meat alternatives) have long been a staple in various forms, such as tofu and miso. Dishes that mimic meat, like tofu hamburgers, are also well-known. However, the adoption of modern alternative meats closely mimicking the appearance, taste, and texture of traditional meat has been slower in Japan than in Western countries, and public awareness remains insufficient. Takeda et al. (2023) provided fundamental information on consumer acceptance of five types of alternative proteins (Takeda et al. 2023): while Japanese consumers are relatively familiar with plant-based and insect-based meats, nearly half are unaware of products such as cultured meat and alternative milk, with only around 10% of survey participants claiming to understand these products. A segment of consumers with strong scientific interest showed a positive attitude toward purchasing meat alternatives.

In contrast, the United States has led the way in the alternative meat market, with the sale of cultured meat granted approval in 2023 (Wiener-Bronner, 2023). In the U.S., alternative meat options are available in common restaurants, making it a relatively familiar food for consumers; therefore, it is expected that more people in the U.S. have experience eating or purchasing alternative meats compared to Japan, and they are likely to have more knowledge about the taste and health benefits of these products. However, there are also opposition movements, including labeling regulations regarding the naming of alternative meat products proposed by traditional livestock producers (Reynolds, 2024).

Previous studies on the consumption of meat alternatives have suggested that factors like taste, health benefits, and convenience of the product are more important than moral motivations, such as environmental conservation and animal welfare. Specifically, a 2019 international large-scale survey targeting consumer interest in alternative meat products indicated that factors such as health benefits influence willingness to purchase meat alternatives (Gómez-Luciano et al. 2019). Participants were consistently more positive toward plant-based meat—the most readily available alternative product—than to cultured meat and insect-based meat. Unlike insect-based meat, plant-based meat is made from familiar plant-derived ingredients, making it more accessible to consumers. Several other studies have highlighted the importance of ensuring that the taste, smell, and texture of meat alternatives resemble those of real meat (Bryant, 2019; de Koning et al. 2020); similarly, research has shown that it is important to make meat alternatives resemble conventional processed meat products, to promote widespread adoption (Michel et al. 2021).

While these findings provide important implications for the popularization of meat alternatives, there may be another key to promoting such products without focusing on the taste. A number of studies have noted rapid changes in the social environment have resulted in shifting consumer interests. A survey conducted in the Netherlands in 2006 revealed that more than half of the respondents had not considered reducing meat product consumption and adopting a plant-based diet, nor had they acknowledged its effectiveness in addressing social problems(Lea et al. 2006); another study from that time also reported that only a small group of people chose plant proteins for environmental reasons (de Boer et al. 2007). However, by 2013, a survey in Belgium showed that many participants agreed to reduce meat consumption for a sustainable society, and moreover, 70% of the participants were in favor of taxes and subsidies favoring sustainable meat products (Vanhonacker et al. 2013). Although these are not longitudinal observations collected using the same research methods, they provide evidence of changes in consumer interest in food.

After enjoying food at a restaurant or a cafe, individuals often share their experiences on platforms like TwitterFootnote 1 and Instagram (Abbar et al. 2015); this makes social media a valuable resource for easily accessible information about food, and data from these platforms offer insights into consumer food preferences and how they evolve over time. For instance, a shift in consumer values was captured through a social media data analysis conducted in 2021 (Domalewska, 2021), which revealed that eco-friendly attitudes and sustainable values had strengthened over the course of two years. Sasahara (Sasahara, 2019) indexed consumer food preferences presented in Twitter data and showed that these preferences could predict other preferences in areas like health, politics, and economics. Aleixo (Aleixo et al. 2021) used consumer posts to understand the conceptual differences between the terms “vegan” and “plant-based” and to identify the consumer lifestyles and values related to each word.

Social media like Twitter enable the monitoring of social trends, a process commonly referred to as ‘social listening’. Posts about meat alternatives have rapidly increased in recent years, in line with the growth of the alternative meat market (Fig. 1). Specifically, various discussions were sparked on social media in 2019, which coincided with major alternative meat startups in the US going public (Beyond Meat, 2019) and major fast-food chains beginning to sell alternative meat products (Gibson, 2019).

Fig. 1: The temporal changes in organic tweets (see ‘Data collection and preprocessing’) containing keywords related to alternative meat.
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The graphs do not include retweets or repeated posts by the same users. The number of tweets has increased annually, but in both English and Japanese, a sudden surge occurred in 2019. Note that the Japanese version of Twitter was released two years after the English version, hence the different starting times for data collection.

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One benefit of social media data is its facilitation of easy access to longitudinal and cross-cultural information. It is challenging to ask consumers retrospective questions in surveys, as their responses may be affected by memory lapses or biases. However, social media data preserves statements made at the exact moment they were posted in the past. Additionally, it allows for the collection of multilingual data with less effort. Thus, observing discussions about meat alternatives on social media over time is an effective way to capture shifts in consumer interest.

In short, we used social media data for three reasons: the wealth of food-related information, the capability to retrospectively track social trends, and the simplicity of conducting comparisons across multiple languages.

For our international comparison, we decided to compare tweets in English and Japanese. Since a significant number of Twitter users are based in the United States, the English-language data likely reflects the views of North American users. The United States is a leading country in food technology and spearheads the alternative meat market, while Japan is in a position to follow; in addition, the U.S. and Japan have different food cultures. These differences provide an opportunity to analyze varied consumer thoughts and discussions about meat alternatives, potentially yielding new insights into the needs and perceptions regarding such products.

The purpose of this study is to reveal changes in consumer interest in meat alternatives through a temporal and cross-cultural data analysis of social media. Effective promotion strategies may vary from period to period and from region to region; although appealing to sensory perspectives (e.g., taste) has thus far been the most important to promoting meat alternatives, other factors are also key. We aim to contribute to addressing the social problems related to food by deriving insights that may help further popularize meat alternatives.

Methods

Data collection and preprocessing

The data was collected using Twitter Academic API v2, which is provided by Twitter for academic use. The English dataset included all tweets in 2006–2021 that contained English terms related to meat alternatives (such as “alternative meat”, “fake meat”, “plant-based meat”, and “soy-based meat”), comprising a total of 770,049 tweets. The Japanese dataset consisted of 368,262 tweets in 2008–2021 including the Japanese counterpart terms. Table 1 shows all the keywords that were used as search words.

Table 1 Search words.
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Preprocessing was conducted with the collected tweets. Since this study focuses on users’ spontaneous posts—also referred to as “organic tweets”—we extracted organic tweets for analysis, excluding retweets so as to minimize the impact of large-scale retweeting due to transient “buzz” induced by extrinsic events. Repeated posts by the same user with identical content were excluded to remove duplicates. The English dataset excluded tweets in languages other than English, and tweets in languages other than Japanese were excluded from the Japanese dataset, using the language information identified by Twitter. As a result of the preprocessing, the final datasets consisted of 253,860 tweets (from 156,754 users) in English and 134,091 tweets (from 66,342 users) in Japanese.

For the analysis of the content of each tweet, the text was decomposed into morphemes. Unnecessary symbols, emojis, URLs, and mentions were removed from the text, and all English words were converted to lowercase. Japanese characters were normalized to full-width, and English characters were normalized to half-width. For the morphological analysis, the Python library NLTK (Bird et al. 2009) was used for English and MeCab (mecab, 2013) with the mecab-ipadic-NEologd (NEologd, 2020) dictionary was used for Japanese. Through these steps, the text of each tweet was broken down into a list of morphemes for further text analysis.

Measuring consumer interest

We examined the frequency of words in tweets about alternative meat to observe the shifting interests of consumers. The keywords used for this measurement were adopted from a questionnaire designed to measure motivations behind food choices (Onwezen et al. 2019). Drawing on the categories of motivations for food selection—including taste/sensory appeals, health, animals, environment, natural orientation, price, and convenience—we compiled a list of motivational words indicating interest in meat alternatives (Table 2). The list consisted of categories related to food choice motivations and the words contained in each category.

Table 2 Motivational words.
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We computed the co-occurrence of these motivational words and mentions of meat alternatives in tweets as a proxy of consumers’ interest in meat alternatives. Specifically, within the list of words resulting from the morphological breakdown of each tweet, we counted the number of times a motivational word was included. Here, words ending with an asterisk also count words containing any characters in the place of the asterisk; for example, if the word is “animal*”, it also includes words like “animals”. Accordingly, the tweet “Plant based meat makes it easier to give up the stuff that comes from animals” is considered to contain the word “animal*”. By tracking the temporal changes in motivational words used concurrently in discussions of meat alternatives, we infer shifts in consumer interest in meat alternatives.

Measuring moral foundations

To clarify whether alternative meat has become a moral concern, we tracked the temporal changes of moral word frequencies in the preprocessed tweets about alternative meat. The measurement of morality in this study is based on the Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt and Joseph, 2004, 2008). According to this theory, morality is assumed to involve innate and intuitive judgments based on five foundations—Care, Fairness, In-group, Authority, and Purity—each of which has vice and virtue aspects. The characteristics of the five moral foundations are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3 Moral foundations and related words in MFD and J-MFD.
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To gauge and understand moral foundations from the texts, we used the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) (Graham et al. 2009) and the translated Japanese version (J-MFD) (Matsuo et al. 2019) that has been well validated in multiple studies (Matsuo et al. 2021; Singh et al. 2021). Using these dictionaries, we measured the frequency of co-occurrence of moral words from the MFD or J-MFD with mentions of meat alternatives. Here, an asterisk represents a string of one or more arbitrary characters; thus, words ending in an asterisk count words containing any characters in the place of the asterisk. For example, the word “unfair*” includes words like “unfairness”.

Results

Diversified consumer interest in meat alternatives

Figure 2 shows the proportion of posts mentioning meat alternatives on Twitter that contain words associated with each category. It should be noted that even if the number of Twitter users increases, this does not necessarily result in an increase in posts within specific categories: therefore, the trends in these line graphs representing proportions directly indicate the varying levels of consumer interest in specific categories. As the figure shows, consumer interest in meat alternatives is becoming increasingly diverse. Initially, Twitter discussions on alternative meat products predominantly revolved around their taste; however, by the late 2010s, these discussions started encompassing more than just sensory appeals. In both English and Japanese, the use of words related to sensory appeals has decreased annually, whereas those related to animal welfare and human health have risen.

Fig. 2: Proportion of occurrence of each motivational word category in the dataset.
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The figure shows the proportion of each motivational word’s occurrence in the dataset over the years, calculated by dividing the aggregated number of each motivational word (by category) by the total number of all motivational words (A English, B Japanese). The trend of keyword occurrence in tweets normalized to 2011 values, plotted in a log scale (C English, D Japanese). The number of tweets containing each keyword per year is normalized to the 2011 value, with 2011 as the base year. Motivational words that occurred in no tweets in 2011 are excluded.

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This trend is more pronounced in English tweets. English-speaking people, who have long been interested in the health impacts of alternative meat, are now also expressing interest in the effects on animals and the environment. It seems plausible that in English tweets, alternative meat is garnering attention not only for its food-specific sensory appeals, but also for its broader implications for health, animal welfare, and the environment. This trend is consistent with previous findings from primarily Western studies, which show that while consumers in the early 2000s did not associate social issues with plant-based diets (Lea et al. 2006), current consumers link plant-based meat alternatives with positive health and environmental benefits (Chia et al. 2024; Ketelings et al. 2023). In contrast, in Japanese discussions, the impact of alternative meat on animals is often addressed more than health issues; this suggests that dietary concerns are less prevalent among the Japanese population than among English-speaking populations.

The use of words related to the environment has dramatically increased in the past decade, as indicated in Fig. 2. Figure 2C and D present the rate of change in the number of tweets containing certain motivational words in relation to the number of tweets containing those words in the base year 2011 (a larger difference denotes a more drastic change in use). In both English and Japanese, the most rapidly growing topic over the ten years examined in this study was the environment. This shift may reflect the global surge of interest in environmental issues and the growing evidence of the impact of meat alternatives on environmental conservation. Since the 2010s, dietary preferences such as veganism and vegetarianism have increasingly been associated with ideology and frequently appear in the context of discussions on climate change (Grünhage and Reuter, 2021; Vainio and Mäkiniemi, 2016).

Increases are also seen in dialogues on the impact on animals and on the cost of meat alternatives. English speakers began to mention price more frequently than animal-related topics in 2019, a tipping point reached by Japanese speakers in 2021. This change in focus suggests that consumers may be paying more attention to the cost of meat alternatives as they more seriously consider integrating these products into their diets.

The use of each motivational word reveals nuanced shifts in consumer interest. Figure 3 shows the usage frequency of each motivational word every three years starting in 2012, as well as the degree of change over the decade from 2012. The words are listed in descending order by their value in 2021. It appears that the taste of alternative meat products continues to be the primary focus of consumer interest in both languages, although the priorities are slightly different: the words “tasty” and “taste” still remain the most frequently used in Japanese, whereas in English, references to health exceed those to taste at three time points. This suggests that the demand for health benefits is at times higher than that for taste in English-speaking populations. Japanese people do not seem to have high expectations concerning the health benefits of alternative meat products, since the word “health” ranks fifth in their tweets. These differences may be due to various factors, such as disparities in the maturity of the alternative meat market or differences in food culture; explaining these differences is beyond the scope of this paper, but they should be validated in future studies.

Fig. 3: The yearly proportion of motivation word occurrences by language, along with the 2012–2021 difference.
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The figure shows the proportion, which was calculated by dividing the number of appearances of each motivational word by the total number of occurrences of all motivational words (A English, B Japanese). “Diff”. shows the difference between the 2021 and 2012 values. The data is displayed in descending order based on the values for 2021.

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Besides terms related to taste, the words “health”, “animal”, and “environment” were the most frequently used in both English and Japanese tweets. The frequencies and ranks of these terms differ across the two languages: references to health were the most common in English, but references to animals and the environment exceeded those to health in Japanese. In both languages, the frequency of the term “health” is on the decline, suggesting a rise in attention to the benefits for animals and the environment.

The period 2012–2021 saw a notable increase in the usage rate of terms related to “price” in English tweets. This suggests that consumers are becoming increasingly price-sensitive as they begin to seriously consider incorporating meat alternatives into their diets. Conversely, in Japanese tweets, the emphasis on cost remained relatively moderate, with taste continuing to be the predominant subject of interest.

Growing moral concern related to alternative meat

Consumer interest in alternative meat has shifted from sensory appeals, such as taste and texture, to concerns about impacts on the environment and animals. Put differently, it appears that consumers are starting to consider meat alternatives for moral reasons, such as a desire to “protect the environment” or to “avoid causing harm to animals”.

We used the MFD and the J-MFD to elucidate changes in the relationship between meat alternatives and morality. The proportion of tweets containing at least one moral word from either the MFD or J-MFD has increased (Fig. 4), suggesting that the trend of discussing alternative meat within a moral context is growing. The usage rate of moral words in English tweets was generally higher than that in Japanese tweets as of 2021. A 1-2 year lag of Japanese consumers behind English-speaking consumers can be seen in the timing of increased usage, suggesting that moral discussions about alternative meat are spearheaded in English-speaking areas.

Fig. 4: Usage of moral words.
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A The evolution of the number of alternative meat-related tweets containing at least one moral term. B The percentage of tweets that contain moral words out of the total number of alternative meat-related tweets.

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We compared the conditional probabilities of moral word usage in order to examine whether moral discussions were taking place, especially in tweets related to animals and the environment. Figure 5 shows the differences in moral word usage rates between all tweets and tweets containing words from the several most frequent categories, as seen over the past three years. The usage rate of moral words in tweets containing the words “animal” or “environment” is about twice as high as the usage rate of moral words in all tweets, and the former also includes more moral words compared to tweets with words in the categories of “sensory appeal” and “health”. This suggests that when consumers discuss meat alternatives in conjunction with the environment or animals, they more frequently reference morality.

Fig. 5: Usage of moral words in animal and environment tweets.
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The probability of alternative meat-related tweets containing a moral word, and the conditional probability that tweets containing a word from the categories “sensory appeal”, “animal welfare”, “health”, or “environmental protection” also include a moral word (A English, B Japanese). The rates of moral words in tweets containing the words “animal” or “environment”, per moral foundation (C English, D Japanese).

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Figure 5 illustrates the proportion of each moral foundation in tweets containing the words “environment” or “animal”. In these specific tweets, the category of “Care” consistently accounts for nearly half of moral foundation references, and this trend is more pronounced in English. The “Care” category includes both positive words (e.g., “protect”, “safe”) and negative words (e.g., “harm”, “suffer”), indicating substantial discussion about harm to the environment or to animals.

These results suggest that when consumers discuss meat alternatives, they increasingly reference the environment or animals. These references often take a moral approach, such as stating that “the environment or animals are being harmed”. In other words, meat alternatives are increasingly becoming moral concerns.

Discussion

From sensory interest to moral concern

Consumer perceptions and values regarding meat alternatives seem to have changed over the past decade or so. While several articles have addressed the perception and value issues of meat consumption, little quantitative and longitudinal data have been collected to substantiate this broad consumer trend until now. In this study involving an analysis of longitudinal Twitter data on meat alternatives over the past 15 years, we demonstrated that consumer interest in meat alternatives has evolved to become diverse and moralized. The number of tweets containing terms related to meat alternatives and the number of users tweeting about them have rapidly increased in recent years (Fig. 1), indicating that consumer interest in meat alternatives is growing in both Japanese and English-speaking cultures. Consumers still show the most interest in sensory aspects like taste, but their focus is gradually shifting toward environmental protection, animal welfare, health, and socio-cultural factors such as price. Topics related to the environment and animals are particularly likely to become significant issues in the discussion of meat alternatives, as they have attracted increasing attention over the years.

Furthermore, the increasing use of moral words in tweets indicates that attitudes about meat alternatives have become moralized. The fact that moral words are used more frequently in tweets about the environment and animals suggests that consumers are being drawn to meat alternatives for moral reasons, such as “not eating meat to protect the environment” and “not eating meat for the sake of animal welfare”. Although previous studies underestimated the role of the moral aspects of alternative meat products in relation to expanding demand, we have evidence that consumers are currently more interested in the moral benefits of meat alternatives than they used to be. This outcome underscores the importance of long-term observation of social data and underlines the profound significance of this research.

The observation that consumers are increasingly holding moral concerns regarding alternative meats aligns with recent empirical findings. Some consumers, such as flexitarians, experience moral conflicts regarding the consumption of animal-derived products, like meat and dairy milk (Ioannidou et al. 2023); in contrast, omnivores tend to experience fewer such conflicts. This potentially leads to discussions on social media about differences in dietary styles. Additionally, another study suggests that moral concerns related to environmental issues may influence consumer behavior (Nisbett and Spaiser, 2023).

The relationship between meat consumption and morality has been mentioned in other studies. De Boer (de Boer et al. 2007) differentiated the motivations for reducing meat consumption or buying more organic meat into intuitive motivations (including taste) and rational motivations (including morality); the study reported that consumers reduce meat consumption or buy more organic meat for moral reasons, such as animal welfare. However, the study also observed that intuitive individuals, who prioritize taste in food choices, make the same choice. This suggests that people engaging in the same behavior may be motivated by different reasons, thus necessitating appeals that are tailored to the various attributes of consumers. In light of our findings that consumers’ interest in meat alternatives for moral reasons appears to be growing, more discussion should be held about the appeal to morally concerned consumers.

However, a deeper understanding is needed of the extent to which moral concerns about meat alternatives influence actual consumption. In a market where the pursuit of self-interest is prevalent, the impact of morality on curbing selfishness may be limited (Campbell and Winterich, 2018). Although consumers tend to be less inclined to purchase products made through unethical manufacturing processes, the influence of morality can be offset by differences in functionality or price between conventional and ethical products (Auger et al. 2008; Paharia et al. 2013). As seen in Fig. 3, the increasing concern about the price of alternative meats in the United States suggests that consumers might be considering incorporating these products into their diets. However, alternative meats remain more expensive than traditional meats, and perceptual factors such as taste and texture are still in development. Therefore, consumers may find it challenging to include alternative meats in their regular diet. While the relationship between consumption and morality may be gradually changing for consumers, further research is needed to determine the extent to which moral concerns about alternative meats impact actual consumer behavior.

Similarities and differences were found between English and Japanese tweets in terms of trends. In both languages, the interest in sensory appeals is decreasing, and the connection between meat alternatives and concerns about animals and the environment is intensifying; the usage of moral words is increasing, and the dimension of “Care/Harm” is important in both languages. However, differences were observed in the extent of interest in several aspects of meat alternatives. Specifically, English tweets showed more interest in other aspects than sensory appeal (e.g., taste) than did Japanese tweets. In particular, in English tweets, health-related concerns are strong, and interest in animals, the environment, and price also grew; in addition, moral words were used more frequently, suggesting a stronger connection between meat alternatives and morality. In contrast, in Japanese tweets, meat alternatives are still predominantly associated with taste. In terms of an explanation for these findings, English-speaking countries and Japan seem to differ in their level of awareness of meat alternatives; additionally, it is still unclear whether the observed differences are based on the maturity of the national alternative meat market or on differences in food culture. Further investigation is needed regarding these cultural differences.

It is important to note that the changes in consumer interest in food that were observed in this study may be confined to specific regions. Previous international cross-sectional studies have shown that the acceptance of alternative meats varies somewhat by country (Gómez-Luciano et al. 2019). Changes in food-related values are facilitated by certain factors, such as high individual income levels; without such factors, changes are less likely to occur. In fact, while per-capita meat consumption has been declining in some Western countries, such as Western European countries, it has been increasing in others, such as Brazil, Chile, and Turkey (OECD, nd). Additionally, the emergence of new alternative meat products, like cultured meat, has sparked legal debates over the definition of ‘alternative meats’, with some movements proposing measures to prohibit the use of livestock-related names for these products (Sexton et al. 2019; Tziva et al. 2023). Such measures could potentially hinder efforts to reduce meat consumption. The Twitter data used in this study cannot classify tweets by country; therefore, changes in food-related values and the rise in moral concerns regarding alternative meats should be substantiated by more empirical research conducted on a country-by-country basis.

Limitations and future work

This study has its limitations. First, this research used posts about meat alternatives on social media as a proxy of consumers’ interest; however, these posts are not directly related to the purchase and consumption of meat alternatives. Various reports have discussed the impact of morality on consumption behavior (Kovacheff et al. 2018; Skitka, 2010), with one study showing through multiple experiments that the more people’s positive attitudes toward a product are due to moral reasons, the more willing they are to purchase the product (Luttrell et al. 2021). Investigation is needed into the causal links of whether an appeal to moral foundations increases the consumption of meat alternatives.

In addition, since there is bias in the demographics of social media users, there may be bias in our Twitter samples and thus in the results of this study (Vidal et al. 2015). For instance, the sample might predominantly include younger users, or those with strong emotional investment in the topic and relevant information to share. Consequently, moral concerns observed among Twitter users in this study may be skewed toward certain demographics, necessitating caution in generalizing these findings to broader populations. To promote actual consumption of meat alternatives, these drawbacks of social media data need to be supplemented: research is needed on the relationship between consumer posts on Twitter and purchasing behavior, as well as on the morally motivated consumers revealed in this study.

Additionally, it is important to note that our approach using the Moral Foundations Dictionary does not sufficiently detect sarcasm or double negatives in sentences. Analyzing text based on the MFD presents significant challenges in classifying sarcasm and double meanings. To compensate for this issue, our analysis focuses on changes in the presence of moral foundations, rather than the quality of moral judgments. Namely, the dictionary includes words related to both “Virtue” (good morality) and “Vice” (bad morality) for each of the five moral foundations; while distinguishing between Virtue and Vice would require separating terms like “not harm” and “harm”, simply counting the occurrences of the word “harm” is sufficient to determine the presence of the Harm foundation. Nevertheless, a more accurate understanding of context, such as sarcasm, would allow for a more detailed capture of consumer interests and concerns. This aspect could be better quantified in future research with the use of large language models (LLMs).

Finally, this study did not classify meat alternatives into subcategories, such as insect meat, plant-based meat, and lab-grown meat; to better understand consumers, it is necessary for future research to consider differentiating the types of meat alternatives.