Heterogeneous trends of animal product consumption in the US: Evidence from grocery purchase data

摘要

Over the past two decades, U.S. meat consumption has remained high while purchases of plant-based alternatives have grown, raising questions about whether consumer behavior is shifting. Answering this question is difficult: survey measures may overstate meat avoidance because stated identities and reported behavior do not always align with purchases, including because of social-desirability concerns, and aggregated data obscure heterogeneity across households and regions. To address these challenges, we use a U.S. household grocery panel (2004–2020) linked with ingredient-level product data and develop a machine-learning-based classification of grocery purchases. We show that, despite modest growth in meat’s grocery-weight share, the share of screened household-months with no recorded meat grocery purchases rises from about 5.6% to about 7.5% by the end of 2019, and the share with no recorded animal-product grocery purchases rises from about 0.4% to about 1.2%, revealing growing polarization in grocery-purchase behavior. These increases partially reverse in 2020, when pandemic conditions shift consumption back toward food at home, consistent with declining food-at-home grocery purchasing accounting for part of the pre-pandemic rise in non-purchasing. Heterogeneity across demographic groups is consistent with cohort and demographic composition contributing to these patterns, though the grocery panel cannot cleanly separate composition, food-away-from-home substitution, and within-household behavior. By contrast, the extensive-margin patterns begin before modern plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) become prominent; PBMA spending shares are too small to account mechanically for much of aggregate meat-purchase changes, and their timing and limited penetration make them unlikely to explain the broader non-purchasing patterns on their own. Our findings reconcile persistently high aggregate meat consumption with the increasing visibility of meat avoidance.