“Soy Boy vs. Holy Cow”—Understanding the Key Factors Determining U.S. Consumers’ Preferences and Commitment to Plant-Based Milk Alternatives
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This article covers an important topic and provides valuable insights into literature and management. It is crucial to address the consumers' preferences and commitment towards plant-based milk products in the literature.
The authors have done an excellent job addressing the model presentation, sample, and procedures used for data analysis.
The authors utilized the PLS-SEM approach following the literature recommendations to ensure reliable estimations, including convergent and discriminant reliability. However, I could not find any evidence of assessing the presence of Common Method Bias in the data, which could be an opportunity to improve further the reliability of the estimations presented.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
the paper is both intriguing and current, and I believe it can contribute novel insights to the literature. However, here are some suggestions for improvement.
The referenced literature could be expanded. Numerous studies are currently investigating the topic, which could provide additional support to your research. Providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature could assist in highlighting the existing gaps. Among these, I would like to mention two works that I found particularly interesting, but I encourage you to explore others as well:
- Rizzo, G., Testa, R., Dudinskaya, E. C., Mandolesi, S., Solfanelli, F., Zanoli, R., ... & Migliore, G. (2023). Understanding the consumption of plant-based meat alternatives and the role of health-related aspects. A study of the Italian market. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 32, 100690.
- Silva, A. R., Silva, M. M., & Ribeiro, B. D. (2020). Health issues and technological aspects of plant-based alternative milk. Food Research International, 131, 108972.
- Alae-Carew, C., Green, R., Stewart, C., Cook, B., Dangour, A. D., & Scheelbeek, P. F. (2022). The role of plant-based alternative foods in sustainable and healthy food systems: Consumption trends in the UK. Science of the Total Environment, 807, 151041.
Furthermore, in order to enhance the appeal of your study, it would be beneficial to more clearly underline the existing gap in the literature that your research aims to address, thus emphasizing the objectives more effectively. Additionally, incorporating more relevant literature references into the discussions could enrich the content.
Lastly, in the conclusions section, it would be valuable to detail the study's limitations.
I hope that my suggestions have been helpful to you. Best of luck with the publication process.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
This is a strong paper. It responds to an important consumer-facing environmental issue and also to a noted literature gap. The review is current and well written and the methods section is clear and logical. The authors havve gathered primary US consumer data and have analysed this using SEM and presented the analyses clearly and logically.
Some issues (not fatal and not really addressable at this stage) relate to selection bias. Sampling only consumers of plany-based milk alternatives when assessing questions relating to a preference for these over traditional dairy would seem to me to create endogeneity and sampling bias issues.
Also, dairy is relatively over-consumed by children and the purchasing is often done by a parent. This raises interesting issues that were not explored.
A little more information on the scale development (where the questions came from, for example) may be useful.
I really enjoyed the paper - well written, good data well analysed and presented. Thank you.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
