Reframing Veggie Talk
It’s hard to remember a time when “plant-based” wasn’t a part of our everyday food vocabulary, but just over a decade ago there was a stealthy food movement brewing that would open the doors to today’s plant revolution. It was a time when cookbook authors like Jessica Seinfeld and Missy Chase Lapine launched cookbooks helping parents devise ways to sneak pureed vegetables into their children’s meals and food entrepreneurs were touting “hidden vegetables” in their products at the big food shows. It was a time when the value of vegetables began to be recognized as a more necessary part of our diets but was still relegated to the shadows because they were, you know, vegetables. To most anyone in America at that time, there was no question that one would eat meat and pasta over vegetables when it came to the main entree.
More Than Meat-Free
Fast forward to today: a culture by and large moving towards plant-based consumption. More people today are practicing Mediterranean, flexitarian, vegan, vegetarian, and plant-based diets out of health, environmental and/or cost concerns. And Millennials and Gen Z are pushing brands to catch up. For all of the excitement born out of a delicious plant-based option that helps people eat more plants and less meat, however, we remain puzzled at the lack of delicious ways we talk about these foods.
“While fake meat sales still can’t hold a candle to real meat revenue, AdAge reports that profits have more than doubled from 2013 to $1.4 billion last year and Allied Market Research predicts they’ll surpass $5 billion by 2020. ”
For the most part, new plant-based food options like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and Lifeway Foods are referred to in meat-alternative vernacular. It not only connects how meat alternatives fit with familiar food items but also how it can be seen as delicious as its “real meat” rival. A recent tweet from New York Times styles writer Taylor Lorenz illustrates how we use meat and meatless as references to one another.
Rebranding Vegetables
As the tweet argues, vegan restaurants talking to vegans should be, of all audiences and apertures, the moment to break the meat analogy and embrace fully the ‘plant’ part of plant-based. Without question or controversy, vegetables are inherently healthy. But is healthy thus…inherently boring? Vegetables are valued because of their health attributes, but they are rarely described in ways that whet our appetites.
In a study out last October, published in the journal Psychological Science, the research findings present an opportunity to flip our conventional thinking about how we talk about vegetables. From the abstract: “Healthy food labels tout health benefits, yet most people prioritize tastiness in the moment of food choice. In a preregistered intervention, we tested whether taste-focused labels compared with health-focused labels increased vegetable intake at five university dining halls throughout the United States. Across 137,842 diner decisions, 185 days, and 24 vegetable types, taste-focused labels increased vegetable selection by 29% compared with health-focused labels and by 14% compared with basic labels. Vegetable consumption also increased.”
“And yet in retrospect it’s like, of course, why haven’t we been focusing on making healthy foods more delicious and indulgent all along? ”
A Rose By Any Other Name…
If you work in food, you’ve said at some point when looking at marketing materials that “taste is king.” Why would we not use that same lens with healthy foods? The Better Buying Lab published a report earlier this year with the goal to figure out how to help food companies get people to eat more sustainably. The solution, summarized by the head of The Better Buying Lab Daniel Vennard, is to “Focus less on the meat-free or health aspects of plant-based foods — which tend to make consumers feel like they're missing out — and more on their flavor, mouthfeel and provenance, so it's "appealing to the inner food critic within all of us."
“When it comes to their food, today’s consumers want their ingredients as pure and simple as possible. When it’s time to talk about it, it’s ok to add a little flavor. In addition, providing cultural relevance elevates the ingredients/dish to a better place. When the mind can go there, the taste buds will follow.”
The Better Buying Lab took this learning and partnered with Panera Bread for the rebrand of a vegetarian black bean soup that was labeled low fat. In taste tests, the soup performed well but on menus it failed to gain routine trial. When they rebranded the soup as “Cuban black bean soup” in an 18-store test, they saw a sales increase of 13%. “Cuban” had the effect of imparting flavor that “vegetarian” simply couldn’t. A different test with Sainsbury’s to rebrand its “meat free sausage and mash” offering to “Cumberland-spiced veggie sausage and mash” sales went up by 76%. Thinking more creatively about how food is described clearly benefits both brands and consumers.
Conclusion
Consumers wants to eat more plants, and to help them do that, we’ll need to rethink how we talk about vegetables. It might appear that simple changes in copy can do the trick - and to some extend that will have a powerful effect - but how do we re-imagine the deliciousness of plants in food marketing, thinking like chefs and food critics to create crave?