The missing ingredient in plant-based food isn’t taste or nutrition

For years, plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy have tried – and failed – to beat the real thing on price and taste.

No longer.

Plant-based foods are nearing or achieving taste parity with meat and dairy products for the first time. In blind taste tests conducted by Nectar, a project of the climate nonprofit Food System Innovations, Califia Farms Oat Barista Blend was ranked as highly as conventional whole milk in head-to-head trials. Impossible and MorningStar Farms nuggets nearly tied with real chicken.

Those remain exceptions, not the rule. After the sizzling success of companies like Beyond and Impossible Foods around 2020, the alt-protein market entered a deep freeze. U.S. retail sales of plant‑based meat have shrunk every year since, and several high‑profile start-ups have closed. Plant-based meat is just “not in vogue right now,” Peter McGuinness, the former CEO of Impossible, admitted last year.

To revive demand, Nectar says, brands need to invest in taste and texture.

“Taste is definitely the biggest reason that consumers do not repeat purchase plant-based products,” said Caroline Cotto at Food System Innovations, who oversees Nectar’s work to evaluate and promote plant-based foods.

Most aren’t close to rivaling the animal-based originals. Just 33% of participants in Nectar’s study rated dairy-free products with “like” or “like very much,” roughly half the rate of the animal benchmarks.

Products that compete on taste are being rewarded. Plant milk, the best-tasting category in Nectar, has 15 times higher market share than plant-based cheese, the worst rated on taste and texture. A similar relationship was found for meat alternatives.

Yet taste alone will not win over most Americans.

Even when plant-based options are perceived as equal on price and taste, most people keep choosing meat: Only about 1 in 4 consumers pick the plant-based option in choice experiments, according to Rethink Priorities, a research nonprofit focused on animal welfare.

The crucial missing ingredient? A cultural story powerful enough to dethrone meat from the center of the plate.

People don’t buy products just for what they do. The 300 or so passenger vehicle models on sale in America, with thousands of trim configurations, testify to this.

We often buy things as an extension of our personality, because of who they make us feel like. And few things are more wrapped up in identity and culture than food, especially meat.

That’s why Emilie Fitch, founder of People for Better Food, a nonprofit promoting plant-rich diets, is recruiting influencers to speak about planet-based benefits that have nothing to do with the environment or animal welfare.

Her first target: young men obsessed with working out.

The pitch has nothing to do with climate or animals and everything to do with strength, performance and personal gains. Plant proteins can match or outperform beef on all of them.

“Young men are driving the protein conversation,” Fitch says of the demographic, which is at the core of the 12% of elite beef consumers who account for half of all beef eaten in the United States.

Fitch is abandoning the appeals that have failed to work for decades (just 4% of Americans identify as vegetarian). “We’ve been the Tesla salesperson going to a NASCAR rally,” she said. “We’re trying to sell them something that they don’t want from a person they don’t trust.”

Once price, taste and culture converge, she argues, plant-based foods are far more likely to become more than a side dish for the majority of Americans. “It’s three legs of the stool,” she says. “All need to happen. Personally, I think culture comes first.”

Here’s which plant-based foods are beating their conventional counterparts, and the stories fueling the future of meat-free eating.

True winners

Tesla didn’t win by building a better electric car. It became the world’s most valuable automaker by building a better car, period. Millions of people did a test drive and felt that going electric wasn’t a sacrifice. From virtually a standing start 15 years ago, electric vehicles are now on track to represent roughly half of all sales globally by 2035, according to the International Energy Agency – decades ahead of early projections.

To succeed, plant-based foods will need to pull off a similar feat. Few products are up to the task. Only the dairy aisle has a true winner in Nectar’s tests.

“Coffee creamer and barista milk are a good equivalent of Tesla,” said Cotto, who noted that coffee shops around the world offer oat milk, sometimes as a default choice over cow’s milk. “Those are categories that people are reaching for because they like them better.” Califia Farms Oat Barista Blend was the only one in its blind taste tests to achieve taste parity with the dairy benchmark, although some were close behind.

The meat aisle has fewer plant-based champions, but burgers and chicken nuggets are crossing the threshold from inferior substitute to virtual equal. Impossible Unbreaded Chicken Breast, Impossible Burger, and chicken nuggets from MorningStar Farms and Impossible all achieved “near parity” on taste, with no statistically significant preference for conventional meat in blind taste tests.

Parents, in particular, have embraced plant-based and “blended” proteins, such as Perdue’s Chicken Plus, which includes veggies and meat, for their children. “Even people who were not as interested in plant-based are choosing that option,” said Cotto. “They think it tastes great, and their kids love it.”

So far, these are the exceptions. In blind taste tests, Nectar found that most plant-based products fail to convince a majority of tasters that they’re as good as the animal original. Only about 16% of the 122 plant-based meat products tested in 2025, and roughly 25% of the 98 dairy-free products tested in 2026, cleared that bar (see the full dataset here).

“At best, most plant-based alternatives to meat are making consumers feel sort of refreshed and responsible. At worst, they’re making them feel disappointed and suspicious,” says Cotto. “What (plant-based) dairy is doing really well is tapping into the emotions of comfort and nostalgia and joy and indulgence.”

Culture wars and food fights

Hot dogs at the ballpark. Ice cream sundaes by the beach. The Thanksgiving turkey in Norman Rockwell’s painting “Freedom From Want.”

Meat and dairy feel woven into American society. That’s partly by design: Billions of dollars have been spent by marketers to package personal identity into specific foods.

Fitch was one of those doing it. As a manager at what is now Kraft Heinz, she oversaw food brands representing $600 million in sales when Kraft wanted to sell more Velveeta Shells & Cheese to young men right out of college.

“We were really focused on understanding what their conversation was and finding ways to insert ourselves,” she said. “It’s something we learned over and over again.” The result was “Liquid Gold,” a campaign in the early 2010s that leaned into absurdist humor and what Kraft correctly identified as a lifestyle identity for young men: cooking cheap, tasty food with virtually no effort.

One clip showed a gold miner camped in the grocery aisle, cooking a bright orange bowl of noodles over an open fire. Within a year, household adoption among young men jumped 25%, Fitch said.

Fitch is now using those tactics to sell plant-based protein. She’s focused on shifting the story of masculinity, especially strength, tied to animal protein, in no small part because, she said, “the meat and dairy industry has mastered the cultural marketing playbook.”

Her first target: gym bros.

Fitch’s campaign, with the tagline “What PEDs are you on?,” might sound virtually unintelligible to many people. But it speaks directly to her target audience. Fitch recruited Jesse James West, a fitness YouTuber with more than 9 million subscribers, to ask gym-goers about their “performance-enhancing diet,” a play on gym culture’s other PED: performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids and human growth hormone.

The video positions plant protein as an edgy, underrated, science-backed performance enhancer for health and performance. There’s no mention of climate or animal welfare.

“Ideally, in the next year, these guys will be saying there are major benefits of adding more plant protein,” said Fitch. “It’s really about shifting that conversation and the belief system before they’re going to start buying something different in the store.” Audiences have engaged with the ads at rates at least five times higher than typical benchmarks, she said, for a fraction of the average cost.

Will it work in the U.S.? Germany – a country that gave the world bratwurst and inspired the hamburger – may offer a preview.

Since the 1990s, per capita meat consumption has fallen, and surveys suggest that 41 % of Germans now identify as flexitarian. Rügenwalder Mühle, a sausage company founded in 1834, generates more revenue from plant-based alternatives than from meat.

The grocery chain Lidl is aggressively marketing its Vemondo plant-based line, setting prices at or below those of conventional meat and dairy. It’s working: In the six months after cutting prices, the chain’s sales of meat-free products soared more than 30%.

Lidl Germany is now committed to shifting its total protein sales to a 20/80 plant‑to‑animal split by 2030, joining at least four other countries where the retailer has similar targets, according to Rethink Priorities.

The U.S., where Lidl opened in 2017, is not among them. The company cited “customer demand,” but preferences can change fast.

If you’d told American diners in the 1950s that restaurants serving raw fish on rice would be wildly popular, you’d have been met with disbelief.

All it took was something delicious and affordable, and a story people were ready to make their own.