Preferences of German Consumers for Meat Products Blended with Plant-Based Proteins

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research is very interesting, although the article has some limits that should be overcome. Here are some indications:

Not enough attention is paid to the issue of sustainability. Considering the review to which the article was submitted, it would be necessary to further develop the theme, at least in the introduction and conclusions, for example through quantification of the reduction of methane emissions that can be achieved by exploiting the market opportunities that the analysis seems to indicate;

Paragraphs 2.1 - 2.4 analyze the literature regarding 4 themes (Sensory, Environment, Animal welfare, and Health) to which the model will then refer. Paragraphs 2.5 and 2.6 analyze the literature, but also provide some indications on the variables that will be used later. Why this diversity of approach?

In paragraph 2.5 it is said that "in this study 15 out of the 16 items of the Meat Attachment Questionnaire of [14] were selected for measuring the psychometric construct". No reason is given for the exclusion of the 16th item.

In paragraph 2.5 the acronym MAQ (used in the following pages) should be specified (as FNS at the end of paragraph 2.6).

In paragraph 2.6 the food neophobia scale is revered, but not the items on which it is built.

In paragraph 2.6, should "plethora" be understood in a negative sense?

In paragraph 3., Table 1 could be deleted since the data in it are not used in any way. Alternatively, it could be moved to the appendix.

In Table 1, it should be specified that the income is monthly (I suppose).

The first half of paragraph 3.1 could be deleted.

The second half should be more developed. In particular, the model presented includes 8 independent variables:

• 2 have been extensively treated previously (paragraphs 2.5, 2.6, and the initial part of paragraph 3);
• 4 refer conceptually to paragraphs 2.1 - 2.4 but are not discussed at all in their nature and determination, if not as "...evaluation if either meat hybrids or meat is perceived as ...";
• 2 variables are introduced without any preliminary explanation.

In the sentence "...evaluation if either..." cited some lines above, the environment is indicated twice and the authors forget the animal welfare.

In paragraph 4.4, the sentence "subsequently...." is not clearly written. The "willingness-to-pay more" is questionable and could be safely deleted, since it is no longer treated.

The final part of the conclusions does not seem to be related to the analysis. See, for example, the statement "the scepticism of consumers of mixing meat and plant protein has been greatly reduced in recent years".

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, we have been very grateful for the comments and critical remarks. We rewrote major parts of the paper, added additional literature, and tried to address all your concerns you have had. Furthermore, now we improved the ordering and display of the tables and figures. In addition, we give now a clearer description of our variables and the motivation why these are analysed.

Best regards and thanks a lot for your work,

The corresponding author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper reports interesting results, but several several sections must be improved (or added).

As reported in the instructions for authors all manuscripts must contain the sections:  Materials & Methods and Conclusions. Please add the methodology and the conclusion. As concern the methodology please improve the details about the questionnaire. 

Line 132: please add (MAQ) after "Meat Attachment Questionnaire"

Line 134: cut (FNS)

Line 224-237. Section 4.3. Consumption of substitutes.  Authors should explain why in the list of meat substitutes were insert several non protein foods. These products cannot be considered as meat substitutes, from a nutritional point of view, but only as meal replacements.

Results of Table 5 and 6 should be unified.

Please reports all Tables titles before the tables and improve figure captions.

The discussion section must be improved.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, we have been very grateful for the comments and critical remarks. We rewrote major parts of the paper, added additional literature, and tried to address all your concerns you have had. Furthermore, now we improved the ordering and display of the tables and figures.

Best regards and thanks a lot for your work,

The corresponding author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript ID: sustainability-1033630

Title: Consumer preferences for meat products blended with plant-based proteins in Germany

Authors: Adriano Profeta, Marie-Christin Baune, Sergiy Smetana, Sabine Bornkessel, Keshia Broucke, Gert van Royen, Ulrich Enneking, Jochen Weiss, Volker Heinz, Nino Terjung

Overview and general recommendation:

According to the authors manuscript aims on identifying consumer attitudes and preferences by online-survey for meat alternatives such as meathybrids.

The topic of the research is very actual, according to the newest data that by the situation connected with Covid-19 lots of consumers decided to limits meat consumption.

Although the subject of replacing meat products is very interesting and meet consumers’ expectation I am not convinced by the manuscript. In my opinion it is not well organised as well as is based on erroneous assumptions.

Below I give some concerns that require review:

1. Topic – Authors are making survey about blending meat products with plant protein and according to information given in the text they are expecting this product to be more healthy. They are giving the examples of several diseases that are connected with overconsumption of meat products, but adding plant protein is not going to eliminate fat and other meat related factors that responsible for diseases. Products based only on plant raw materials are the answer for the bad diet as in plants there are polyunsaturated fatty acids, fiber, and also the mentioned protein. In my opinion replacing meat product by a plant protein up to 50% is either a bad wording or a bad assumption. Also my concerns is the idea of using meathybrids as a product for those consumers that are interested in animal welfare issues.
2. Title- “Consumer preferences for meat products blended with plant-based proteins in Germany” – formulation of the title like this readers might have concerns were the meat products blended in Germany, or survey responders were German?
3. Lines 38 – 39 - “…g. textured soy protein, mushroom, wheat gluten, pulses etc. as a complete substitute for animal-protein..” – mushroom and wheat gluten cannot be used as a complete substitute for animal-protein – mushrooms are rather improving taste ingredients and wheat is not complete source of protein (lack of lysine).
4. Chapter 2.1. Sensory – In this chapter there is a collection of knowledge about technological problem that are in hybrid products, and especially connected with the sensory acceptance of a small dosage 2 - 5% of plant protein. This amount is present in meat products for several year - a s ec. soy protein can improve technological parameters of meat products such as eficiency, water and fat capacity. But I do have a doubts if 50% of plant protein incorporated into meat products will be even possible? Besides this will be an exchange of meat, that has just 20% of protein by a protein isolate or concentrate that has at least 60 up to 98% of protein.
5. Chapter Results – Readers don’t have the survey questionnaire, which might be placed as a Supplementary materials, and it would be easier to read this chapter knowing what it will be about, what are the questions?
6. Lines 161 as well as 202-204 – authors are giving explanation that something was change in the last version of the questionnaire, however there is no description what the questionnaire looks like before, so maybe it is not necessary to add those information as they do not help with interpretation of survey results?
7. Tables: the description and numbering of tables shouldn’t bye on the top of a table?
8. Table 1: “still in school” –still at school?
9. Chapter 5. Discussion –in this part of manuscript it shouldn’t be the summery of the results but “Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted. Future research directions may also be mentioned.”.
10. Conclusions – although this section is not mandatory, but I think that in case of this manuscript it is worth adding to conclude survey results and give maybe some directions for meat products producers?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, we have been very grateful for the comments and critical remarks. We rewrote major parts of the paper, added additional literature, and tried to address all your concerns you have had.

 Best regards and thanks a lot for your work,

The corresponding author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper was improved by authors and now can be accepted in the present form, but 

The paper was improved by authors and now can be accepted after minor revision. Following my comments:

• in the revised manuscript the paragraph References is missing
• in the text no references number was reported
• the Tables titles are still at the bottom of the tables

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thanks a lot for your review and that we could satisfy you with the made changes and modifications! Sorry, for the fact that we uploaded the pdf without the references. We added them again, so that the references are shown in the pdf and now changed the table so that the table title is displayed above the table. 

Best regards and a happy new year,

The corresponding author

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript ID: sustainability-1033630 (review II)

Title: Preferences of German consumers for meat products blended with plant-based proteins (Consumer preferences for meat products blended with plant-based proteins in Germany)

Authors: Adriano Profeta, Marie-Christin Baune, Sergiy Smetana, Sabine Bornkessel, Keshia Broucke, Gert van Royen, Ulrich Enneking, Jochen Weiss, Volker Heinz, Nino Terjung

Overview and general recommendation:

Although the authors made several changes in the text, some of them are answers on my review, some are probably connected with the concerns of the other reviewers, I am still not convinced with the  assumption of the manuscript, and analysis of something that is not going to be on the market. Meat hybrids are the future, but not the blends of meat with just the plant protein. So from my, food technologist, point of view, I am still not convinced…

Below I give some of my other concerns that require review:

1. [?] – along the manuscript text there are question mark instead of numbers of citied literature – is this going to be corrected somehow automatically, or is it a mistake, there is also no References list – so I could not find the literature that was added by authors [26, 27, 28] that is about their previous researched?
2. [?]- also the numbers of tables and figures are missing
3. Lines 100-104 – As I have mentioned in upper point, I do not know nothing about the mentioned literature, but checking the authors’ publications by the Orcid number I found that the sensory acceptance was done according to on-line survey, that is not relevant and that does not answer to my concern. What is more the replacement (if it is the cited literature) was done for exchanging meat into plant-based protein seed not just protein!
4. Line 263 - Results – if they are together with the discussion the title of the chapter should be –  Results and discussions
5. Conclusions – thank you very much for the conclusion part, although it is, in my opinion, too long, and the cited literature data is unnecessary. This part is not about the summery of findings but rather the opinion and conclusions that come out of the researches.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

We are very sorry for the mistake with the references in the pdf. References have been in the latex file, but did not appear in the pdf. We changed this and the references are now displayed again in the pdf. The same holds for the referencing to the tables and the figure. 

As proposed we changed the title "Results" to "Results and Discussion". 

For the "Conclusions" it is absolutely true that we wrap in the first sentences the core results of our research. But we think this is useful as an introduction for the subsequent conclusions we have made. Therefore, we would like to leave this section unchanged as it is.

In the first line of the section "Material and Methods" we highlight, that we have carried out an online survey. Of course it would have been better to have sensorial testings as well and we carried out such research but in another funded project. We are sorry that we cannot satisfy your wishes in this respect. 

Nonetheless, we are very grateful for your review and the made comments and proposals for improvement.

Best regards and happy new year, 

The corresponding author 

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript ID: sustainability-1033630 (review III)

Title: Preferences of German consumers for meat products blended with plant-based proteins (Consumer preferences for meat products blended with plant-based proteins in Germany)

Authors: Adriano Profeta, Marie-Christin Baune, Sergiy Smetana, Sabine Bornkessel, Keshia Broucke, Gert van Royen, Ulrich Enneking, Jochen Weiss, Volker Heinz, Nino TerjungOverview and general recommendation:

Thank you very much for answering for my concerns. Authors have replied point by point on my review however I am still not convinced with the assumption and aim of the manuscript. Although I believe that meat hybrids are the future, the way that authors are testing the consumers opinion – by asking consumers question for example: “Consider a food product made of 100% meat and a comparable food product made of 60% meat and 40% plant-based proteins”…is non of good, that product is neither healthier (to much protein) nor even impossible to be made (to support the decision of asking such a question, authors add the literature nr 28 that is not well cited and cannot be easily be found). I am aware of the need to do basic, preliminary research, but they must always be ignited on the basis of realistic assumptions. Therefore, my opinion remains unchanged.