Shallow overview of institutional plant-based meal campaigns in the US and Western Europe

Executive summary

• This report provides a shallow overview of the potential for impactful opportunities from institutional plant-based meal campaigns in the U.S., France, Germany, UK, Spain, and Italy based on reviewing existing research and speaking with organizations conducting such campaigns.
  
• Campaigns that seek to make plant-based meals the default or set ambitious targets to reduce animal product purchases appear to offer potentially large effects. However, these campaigns may have lower chances of winning these changes and ensuring they are held, compared to less restrictive changes like offering more plant-based options every day.
  
• When designing changes, one should emphasize reducing all animal products in order to avoid substitution from beef and lamb to chicken, seafood, and eggs, which require more animals to be harmed.
  
• It appears that most large schools and universities in the U.S., France, and Germany offer regular meatless meal options. This leaves fewer opportunities available for campaigns to secure more of these particular changes. We have not seen strong evidence yet that organizations are winning much stronger changes affecting meals available or served at a large enough scale to offer significant impact.
  
• It appears that classroom offerings of meatless meals in Italy, Spain, and the UK are far less widespread, leaving potential room for impact from further work there. However, because we spent less time researching these countries, further research is recommended to confirm the scale of this potential opportunity, such as supporting a group to replicate these studies (Essere Animali 2024, Ottonova 2022).
  
• The cost-effectiveness of campaigns to win such changes seems to depend on the ambition of the change requested, the relatively high campaign costs even for small wins, and the uncertainty around costs needed to ensure this change is maintained over time. Cost-effectiveness can quickly hit diminishing returns where existing coverage is high and the extent of large-scale opportunities remaining is limited.
  
• High-impact opportunities may be in securing stronger changes from large institutions or catering companies that serve many institutions (e.g., plant-based defaults or high % animal product purchase reductions), expanding the size of commitments secured by relatively low-cost student-led university campaigns, or securing even more modest changes such as plant-based options every day in Italy, Spain, and the UK where existing coverage appears to be low.

Introduction

Numerous non-profit organizations devote substantial effort towards convincing institutions to prioritize at least one of the production, consumption, development, or sale of plant-based foods (e.g., Anima International, The Humane Society of the United States, The Humane League, Mercy For Animals, ProVeg International, Good Food Institute, Essere Animali, Veganuary, Better Food Foundation, GreenerbyDefault). Many of these organizations are motivated by concern for the animals in the food system. Plant-based dining considerations are also increasingly incorporated into major food policy programs, including those in the 50by40 coalition, such as STARS, Good Food Purchasing Program (GFFP), Real Food Challenge, Good Food Cities, Cool Food Pledge, and The Leadership Circle. This focus on plant-based food is related to a broader trend of food systems being incorporated into efforts to curb the harms of climate change.

Given the variety of organizations and possible changes in the space but limited resources available, it’s important to understand how to design interventions and strategically select institutional targets that offer the most impactful opportunities. This report lays out a taxonomy of the various changes organizations are pursuing and considers the potential harms of poorly designed changes leading to more, not fewer, animals being harmed. The report then explores the scope for large-scale impact in the U.S. and large Western European countries of additional work securing such changes. The report focuses on educational institutions (school districts and universities) because previous research has found these to be the most promising, partly because of the larger number of meals served compared to other potential institutions (like hospitals and other government-run facilities like jails and city councils). Finally, the report provides low-confidence estimates of how cost-effective such campaigns appear and what avenues to explore for high-impact opportunities.

Institutional animal product reduction approaches

There are a range of changes that organizations campaign for target institutions to adopt that directly¹ target the amount of plant-based meals offered. Note we use the term “plant-based” in the table below, although many commitments secured in the past have just been “meatless.” Also, simply changing the options available is different from changing the meals actually chosen by diners, though they seem related in many cases.

Table 1: Taxonomy of institutional food commitments ranging from those that emphasize increasing the availability of plant-based options to those that emphasize restricting the availability of animal-based options

Policy	Examples	Effect
Plant-based options every day (with and without needing to request it)	Humane Society for the United States (HSUS) campaigns in U.S. school districts.	Moderate (e.g., almost a quarter of diners will choose the plant-based meal, see Peacock 2023, Better Food Foundation/Sodexo, Boronowsky et al. 2022, Pechey et al. 2022, Malan 2020, Garnett et al. 2019, Campbell-Arvai et al. 2014)
Increasing the ratio of plant-based options to animal-based options	GreenerByDefault worked with LinkedIn to increase plant-based meals from three to five of eight meals on the menu (2023). HSUS’ policies with Sodexo & Aramark to increase their university plant-based offerings by 2025 (44% & 50%, respectively).	Moderate (See Shah & Peacock 2023, Pechey et al. 2022, Malan 2020, Brachem et al. 2019, and Garnett et al. 2019)
Plant-based default (animal-based option available upon request)	GreenerByDefault worked with the New York Mayor’s office to make plant-based meals the default in 11 hospitals (Foodservice 2023). Also see the DefaultVeg universities campaign.	Potentially large (see Ginn & Sparkman 2024, Boronowsky et al. 2022, Meier et al. 2022, Gravert & Kurz 2021, Hansen et al. 2021, Reisch & Sunstein 2021, and Campbell-Arvai et al. 2014)
Plant-based day once per week	Meatless Mondays, which has become less common.	Small to moderate (e.g., study from Sodexo Johns Hopkins 2019 p.6)
Percentage targets requiring a % reduction/replacement in animal -based product purchases by year X, compared to baseline in year Y.	Cool Food Pledge, Good Food Purchasing Program, Leadership Circle, Plant-based universities campaign	Varied (Cool Food Pledge members have seen an ~8% increase in plant-based offerings, a ~17% decrease in total kg of animal products purchased. Other programs ask for 20%-100% reductions but there’s mixed evidence on meeting these targets) (Kreisel et al., 2022)

While the quantity and quality of academic studies of these changes are improving, the evidence base is still far from offering a confident picture of their effects, so the above should not be seen as a definitive summary of effect sizes based on a systematic review and meta-analysis (which we are working on separately). Studies differ in their outcome measure (e.g., share of meals offered, share of meals taken, sales of meals, amount of food taken after accounting for food waste), their design, how well they estimate what would have happened without the intervention, and whether they test for negative spillover effects. Furthermore, there has been far less research on the effectiveness of campaigns to secure these changes.

Poor design can lead to more animals being harmed

Some changes can lead to situations where institutions reduce their overall animal product purchases by weight but increase the number of animals farmed to produce them because more small animals need to be killed to supply the same amount of product (Orzechowski 2022, Piper 2021). This occurrence is especially likely when decision-makers are focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, where they may be inclined to switch from beef to chicken or fish.

However, it need not be the case that reducing emissions always leads to more animal lives being affected. While Cool Food Pledge members aiming to slash greenhouse gas emissions initially cut their purchases of beef, lamb, and pork but increased the volume of chicken, seafood, and eggs purchased (Hughes, 2020, 2:12:50), more recent data (2022, 2021) has shown reductions in the absolute amounts of kilograms purchased for all species of around 17%.² A win-win for climate and animals is reducing shrimp, who are small-bodied, so they dominate impact in terms of individual animals affected (Faunalytics 2024, 2023),³ but also have a carbon footprint larger than pork or chicken per kilogram (Ritchie et al. 2022, Ritchie 2020, Seafood Co, McKuin et al. 2021, Kauffman et al. 2017). The main risk appears to be in cases where reductions are purely in beef and lamb, leading to substitution with chicken, seafood, and eggs, or cases where policies reduce “meat” but increase offerings of seafood (for example, see Gravert & Kurz 2021, Lagasse & Neff 2010). The easiest way to avoid this potential negative effect is to advocate for 100% plant-based menus and, secondarily, perhaps use messaging that focuses on the benefits of increasing consumption of plant-based foods and decreasing animal-based foods rather than solely on the harms of only some animal foods (such as emissions from beef).⁴

In practice, many changes secured in the past have been meatless rather than plant-based. The vast majority of animal impacts from changes to institutional food purchases come from shrimp, chicken, fish, and eggs. This is evident whether we consider metrics such as the number of animals affected or days of life spared (Faunalytics 2024, 2023) or other measures that weigh animal lives relative to human lives (Fischer 2023). There’s a larger animal impact in going from a completely animal-based menu to one with meatless options than going from a menu with meat and seafood-free options to one with plant-based options. When organizations target institutions already offering meat and seafood-free options daily, it's important to recognize that the impact of a switch to a plant-based meal option primarily comes from the change to egg purchases. Unless the campaign is considering a plant-based change on a significantly larger scale than the existing daily meatless option, such as a plant-based default, it may be more impactful to campaign for a less restrictive change like a daily meatless option in an institution that currently lacks any alternatives to animal product meals.

Are there enough opportunities in educational institutions to have impact at scale in the U.S. & Western Europe?

At first glance, there seems to still be a lot of open space in the U.S. school district landscape to increase daily plant-based options. The latest data available at the national level comes from 2018; 56% of all school districts offered vegetarian meals in at least one of their schools, and only 14% offered vegan meals (Price 2022, Silberstein 2020). As another example, among the largest 25 school districts in California in 2022, 68% offered vegetarian options daily or weekly (up from 44% in 2019), but plant-based (non-dairy) options accounted for only 8% of all entrées offered (FOE 2022).

However, there are not many really large school districts remaining without a meatless meal offering. Our rough estimate, based mostly on unpublished research we were given access to, is that, as of 2019, at least 49 of the largest 100 school districts offer meatless options (mostly every day), and we think it’s reasonable to assume there has been an increase in coverage since 2019 nationally, as there was in California’s largest school districts. Since some of these schools are much larger than others, these 49 cover ~63% of students across these 100 schools. After speaking with organizations, the campaign costs to secure changes in large school districts appear to be largely the same as for securing changes in smaller school districts, since they require the same number of organization staff for each, and campaigns tend to only secure a handful of changes per year at most. Both of these facts suggest that, for campaigns asking for a meatless meal option every day, there may not be enough wins left in the U.S. to offer cost-effectiveness at scale, or that campaigns would run out of large wins in a couple of years.

Do the largest U.S. universities offer more space for impact? The largest 100 U.S. universities have student populations that are similar in size to the 100th biggest school district. So, already, the potential scale is smaller unless one campaign successfully covers many universities, which could be achieved through HSUS policies with caterers who serve multiple universities, for example. Only 18 of the largest 100 colleges and universities in the U.S. are not recorded in our dataset as having any significant meatless meal offerings. The vast majority offer vegetarian or vegan options every day, and around one-quarter have Meatless Mondays. Many also have all-vegan dining stations available. Furthermore, HSUS’s commitments from catering companies to serve more plant-based options to universities suggest that some of the universities without an internally decided change, will be, in practice, increasing their plant-based offerings anyway.

What about outside the U.S.? Most German municipalities (including schools and nurseries) offer at least one vegetarian dish every day, and perhaps one-fifth offer vegan dishes (Hartman 2023, VDSKC 2023 March 29). Our own research suggests that most of the largest 10 German universities offer meatless options every day, and many have vegan dining hall options. This is seemingly on the initiative of the Deutsches Studentenwerk (the state-run organizations that provide student services) in response to organic demand from students (Ottonova 2022, Oltermann 2021) amidst a context of declining meat production and consumption (Christen and Dillard 2023). The most advanced large-scale changes in Germany are universities in Berlin where menus were changed to offer ​​68% vegan⁵, 28% vegetarian, and 2% fish-based meals, leading to 90% of meals actually served being vegetarian or vegan in 2023 (EVU 2023, StudierenWerk 2022). Agreements with Sodexo, Compass Group, Aramark, and Apetito to increase university plant-based offerings are also in place in Germany. In France, the Climate and Resilience law made a daily vegetarian option compulsory in all state-run canteens (including universities) that already offered several menu choices, a weekly vegetarian menu was made compulsory for all public and private school canteens, and school authorities were encouraged to participate in a two-year trial to offer more (daily options or even multiple entirely vegetarian days) which has been taken up by “numerous cities, including Bordeaux, Grenoble, Montpellier, Rennes, Strasbourg, Lille, Nantes and Lyon” (EVU 2023).⁶

In other large Western European countries there appears to be more space for improvement; however, we spent less time researching these countries due to external constraints.⁷ In a study of 49 Italian universities, only 15% offered a plant-based main course every day, 30% offered it less often, 55% offered zero plant-based main courses, and none offered 100% plant-based days (Essere Animali 2024). Many Italian schools already offer vegetarian meals (Polidream n.d.), although only in 2021 was the law changed to clarify parents do not need a medical note in addition to requesting their child receive a plant-based meal in school (Gaita 2021), suggesting there is still more friction to obtaining these meals than in other countries reviewed here. In Spain, there is no national regulation that requires schools to offer plant-based options despite a failed attempt to pass such a bill in 2021 (BeunyVegano 2023). Only two out of 17 regions require a 100% plant-based menu option to be made available (upon request) in public schools, and another requires a lacto-ovo-vegetarian option (Feumve, Oliver 2022). The website of “ Families United for a Vegan School Menu” lists 121 schools that do offer a vegan menu, but note there are seven regions where they have not found records of any vegan options available. The provision of a 100% plant-based meal option is not legally required in UK schools, but organizations told us it is the norm to have one meat-free day—though schools still have to serve dairy every day, and it appears daily meatless options are not the norm as ProVeg UK has been running a campaign to secure this in schools.⁸ A rough review we conducted suggests around half of the largest 10 universities in the UK do not seem to have any substantial commitment to increase plant-based meal uptake, though again, university caterers are increasingly adopting commitments to increase plant-based offerings, so coverage could be wider than we found (Özden & Rogers 2023).

How cost-effective are campaigns in the U.S. & Western Europe?

• The most rigorous and comparable analyses we present here are four to five years old, but they indicate cost-effectiveness of 0.4-2.5 animals spared per $ spent from institutional meat reduction policies, as compared to the conventional benchmark farmed animal intervention of 10-280 animals affected by welfare improvements per $ from corporate welfare campaigns to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat (Šimčikas 2019). (Note the difference in outcome metric here. We don’t have any easy way to compare years of better welfare to years of non-existence).
• We spoke to organizations to try to understand if the cost-effectiveness of current opportunities had changed since 2019 and estimated their campaigns’ impact to range from 1.5-18 animals spared per $ spent for campaigns by GreenerbyDefault, HSUS, Essere Animali, and the French branch of Anima International.
• However, there are reasons not to take our estimates literally:
  • Selection bias: The campaigns that were easiest to find information about and organizations most willing to share could be biased towards those with more positive results (though groups have other reasonable objections to sharing data publicly).
  • Verification: It was not within scope to vet these claims (i.e., check with institutions), which seems important given that the more rigorous study that did this vetting found many claims of impact were unsubstantiated.
  • Costs to hold commitments: We don’t include the costs of proper implementation and maintenance of policies.
  • Limited impact tracking: We did not include spillover effects, e.g., whether students subsequently ate more or fewer plant-based meals outside of the food service venue affected by the change.
  • Point estimates: For simplicity, we relied on point estimates rather than probabilistic distributions for the few parameters we used.
• So we suggest discounting these figures by a significant amount, but it's very hard to know by how much. The fact that groups seem to have been more cost-effective in France/Italy may be weak evidence that there is more potential impact at the moment in European countries.

An unpublished report was shared with us of campaigns to secure meatless options every day or one completely meatless day per week at school districts, hospitals, and universities/colleges. When comparing commitments that organizations had claimed to have secured against what the institutions themselves verified, roughly one-third of institutions had never adopted a commitment, adopted a commitment but had now since dropped it, still had a commitment but were skeptical that the groups played a big role in it being adopted, or had scaled back the change. The report noted that the cost-effectiveness of these programs targeting school districts began to decline as organizations increased staff and other costs, partly in response to the need to do more work to ensure commitments were implemented correctly and maintained over time. The report concluded that securing commitments at school districts was the most impactful, partly given the much greater number of meals affected than at universities or healthcare systems. In speaking with a number of organizations working in this space, we have not seen any evidence to think this headline conclusion has changed in the last four years despite some new wins.

The report estimated that over the entire 11 years (2007-2018) of the school district program, between 0.4 and 2.5 animals were spared per dollar spent (0.09 and 0.7 animal years). However, the analysis did not include impacts on eggs, dairy, or shrimp, so we cannot be sure of the total effects on the number of animals affected per $ spent. As one comparison from the space of farmed animal welfare, corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). However, there are reasons to think that the opportunities available today for both institutional meat reduction campaigns and corporate welfare campaigns are less cost-effective than these estimates since a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been achieved by these successful campaigns.⁹

A number of organizations are pursuing stronger changes than meatless options every day or one 100% meatless day per week. Many organizations we spoke with are following an opportunistic approach in their target selection in order to gain traction in the easiest places first and build momentum before moving on to the largest institutions. Groups also use different complementary approaches which have impacts over different time scales; Better Food Foundation has focused on making agreements in university department canteens or cafes without the need for a formal university policy or slow bureaucratic red tape, or making progress with middle-staff responsible for implementation first and targeting leadership later. The result is that, in the short term, it looks harder for these programs with fixed costs to be among the most near-term cost-effective opportunities in the farmed animal welfare space until they can build up to securing larger commitments.

We did not have the capacity to conduct a thorough cost-effectiveness analysis of all these campaigns nor share all the data organizations communicated to us, but we can offer here some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations we made that point in the direction of the potential impact and may be vaguely right, even if precisely wrong. These estimates do not model any negative substitution effects (such as beef being replaced with chicken) and are based on rough estimates of institutional food purchases,¹⁰ rough effect sizes of different campaign asks, and rough campaign costs. So, we do not treat these estimates with the same high confidence we do for other cost-effectiveness estimates we have produced (Shah 2024, Shiller et al, 2023, Šimčikas 2019). We also model the effects of commitments as lasting for five years (or speeding up the adoption of the change by five years) as a simple assumption due to a lack of better data. We report cost-effectiveness below in terms of animals spared per $ spent, but our rough back-of-the-envelope calculations also estimate animal days of life spared per $. Note these are rough estimates made by Rethink Priorities and not necessarily endorsed by the organizations running the campaigns who may reasonably disagree with the simplifying assumptions we made.

The examples presented below are not representative of the average cost-effectiveness of such programs being implemented in these countries, as we did not conduct a thorough review of every campaign. It’s likely that studying a randomly selected organization conducting such campaigns would produce estimates lower than these. The main point of the examples below is to demonstrate that there are at least some campaign opportunities that, at first look, are not orders of magnitude off where we think cost-effective opportunities to improve farmed animal lives currently lie. However, further work should be done on narrowing down the potential of specific opportunities.

GreenerByDefault claims to have transitioned one million meals from meat-based to plant-based, partly through their plant-based defaults in New York hospitals, and we roughly estimate that this shift could impact up to ~450K animals over five years. In the last two years, HSUS has secured a number of commitments from universities to increase the share of plant-based entrees to 30%-55% by 2025-2027 (HSUS 2023). These commitments alone look to add up to ~16M-31M extra plant-based meals over five years, which we roughly estimate could affect up to ~900K-1.8M animals. If we assume each of these campaigns costs $300K (a somewhat arbitrary but not unreasonable estimate), it suggests up to 1.5 and 3 to 6 animals spared per $, respectively.

The French branch of Anima International (Assiettes Végétales) claims to have played a significant role in securing commitments to increase the share of vegetarian options served in universities by the Crous catering company to 30% by 2025 and 50% by 2030 (Crous Redaction Green Finance 2023). They believe they deserve 40% credit for securing an expected 10.6M annual meals transformed at the total cost of ~$65K. If one believes this securing of commitments sped up the adoption of this change by five years, our rough estimates suggest up to ~1.1M animals spared and a cost-effectiveness of ~18 animals per $. Essere Animali, in 2022, started asking for at least 50% plant-based menus in all Italian universities and other institutional canteens (including via their catering companies). They have spent ~$81K over two years, and so far, their biggest success has been a tentative agreement for four universities in the Marche region to adopt their change—which we estimate could lead to up to ~9M-17M additional plant-based meals over five years and up to ~485K-970K animals spared, suggesting ~100-200 meals affected per $ or ~6-12 animals per $. On the other hand, to show how varied impacts can be, Lega Anti Vivisezione in Italy encourages several municipalities to introduce at least one completely plant-based meal into the weekly menu as a default option, but so far, only two schools have adopted one plant-based day per week as a result as far as we can tell (2023).

For other campaigns, we have lower confidence in claims about their cost-effectiveness due to limited data availability, so we do not present cost-effectiveness estimates. In the UK, the plant-based universities campaign (started in 2021) has had a recent wave of success that has led to eight university student unions winning motions requiring university-run catering to offer 100% plant-based menus by 2027/2028 and committing the student unions to lobby their universities to offer 100% plant-based menus from all external caterers who also serve the student body. Overall, the organization reports a 50% pass rate (18 motions put forward: nine voted through, including two of the largest 10 universities in the UK; nine voted down). They have expanded their work to campaigning in 60 UK universities this year and are aiming to secure 15 policy wins across Europe in 2024. While these student-led campaigns are relatively cheap per motion passed due to the volunteer student base, much of the catering on campuses is carried out by external food providers (Gubbins 2023), so the policies are potentially still relatively small in impact until the university commits to also applying the policy to external caterers. Allied Scholars for Animal Protection in the U.S. are just beginning an effort to replicate the UK’s 100% plant-based university campaign, but believe the odds of converting their target universities are low (~10-15%) in the short term and are aiming at smaller asks like converting a university’s law department canteen. BetterFoodFoundation’s DefaultVeg universities campaign is at the moment securing a few small targets per year (like university cafes) and only NYU has adopted a plant-based default among the largest 100 universities in the US, and it doesn’t cover the whole university yet (DefaultVeg 2023), reducing the likely scale of impact there for now. Update (2024 March 14): Sodexo, in collaboration with BetterFoodFoundation, announced that across 400 universities serving a total of one million students per day, unless the university opts out, in dining halls, one station will always offer entirely plant-based options and the main/central station will alternate each day between offering plant-based and animal-based meals as the first option on the menu (FSD 2024).¹¹ On the lower-impact potential, as this campaign is not a strict plant-based default choice architecture, it may have effects closer to offering more plant-based meals which may not change all that much in the many universities that already offer plant-based options daily. On the higher-impact side, if the implementation skews closer to a plant-based default, the campaign could turn out to be cost-competitive with other opportunities to help farmed animals, depending on the costs of securing and maintaining the commitment.

Overall, our low-confidence impression based on speaking with organizations and some existing research is that the cost-effectiveness of such programs hinges on a few issues:

• In sectors like education, the largest institutions are much larger than the average institution in that sector, such that it’s difficult to secure enough smaller wins to match the impact of winning one large win, especially given that it does not appear to be much cheaper to secure wins in smaller institutions.
• Winning a commitment does not guarantee that it will be maintained. There are examples of institutions that trialed but dropped changes, like Meatless Mondays, for a variety of reasons (FSD 2017). Other institutions have withdrawn changes in the face of backlash (Levitt 2020). We don’t have a good sense of how much extra organizations need to spend to secure a commitment for a given number of years.
• More forceful choice architecture, like plant-based defaults or large % reductions, that appear to offer larger effects are only starting to be adopted at scale (the largest example we know of being the NYC hospitals serving ~850K plant-based meals per year), so we are unsure if there will be a lot more resistance to such asks compared to other approaches like increasing plant-based meal options.
• Whether the policy chosen ends up leading to increases in purchases of chicken, seafood, shrimp, or eggs, could outweigh the cuts in other products when counting the impacts on animal welfare.

Conclusion

To the extent one is promoting institutional plant-based meal changes, one can find a win-win for the climate and animals by supporting changes calling for 100% plant-based menus and using messaging that focuses on the benefits of increasing consumption of plant-based foods and decreasing animal-based foods rather than solely on the harms of only some animal foods (such as emissions from beef). Meatless meal options are now relatively widespread among the largest schools and universities in the U.S., Germany, and France. Since the costs to win a commitment in a large institution are largely the same as for a small institution, there are fewer opportunities remaining in these three countries for more large-scale meatless meal options at relatively low cost. There are a number of organizations attempting to secure stronger changes with impacts that show promise, but they are still not targeting the largest institutions given their view that tractability is low. To the extent one is trying to find those high-impact opportunities, they may be in securing stronger changes from large institutions or catering companies that serve many institutions (plant-based defaults or large % meat purchase reductions), expanding the size of commitments secured by student-led university campaigns, or securing plant-based options every day in Italy, Spain, and the UK. This recommendation is, of course, limited by the small set of countries and examples reviewed here.

Acknowledgments

This report is a project of Rethink Priorities—a think tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. It was written by Neil Dullaghan. Thanks to Ben Stevenson and Elisa Autric for data collection and helpful feedback, to Jacob Peacock, Hannah McKay, Daniela R. Waldhorn, and Will McAuliffe for helpful feedback and review. Thank you to the organizations who contributed information about their campaigns. Thanks to Maya Deutchman for copyediting.

If you are interested in Rethink Priorities’ work, please visit our research database and subscribe to our newsletter.

Notes

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1. Note there are also indirect policies that could be implemented by such institutions to affect meal selections that are not covered in this review, such as classroom education, messaging and signage presented alongside meals, changes to labeling like removing the word “vegan,” or offering free samples. See overviews of such policies in Green & Smith 2023. ↩

2. Their technical documentation already highlighted the potential problems: “Although a shift from beef or lamb toward poultry, pork, or fish would result in a GHG emissions reduction, this shift would also generally result in more (smaller) animals being killed overall—and the animals might be raised in more crowded conditions (Saja, 2013). A shift instead toward plant-based foods can avoid this trade-off” (Waite et al., 2019, p. 21). Staff also emphasize that they point people towards their playbook for guiding diners toward plant-rich options in food service — as a result a lot of the emphasis is on plant-based (also see Attwood 2020). There appears to be a dynamic of an “animal lives Kuznets curve,” where institutions at first cut beef and lamb to make quick progress on slashing emissions (but increase small animals by increasing chicken/fish) but then start to cut down across the board in order to keep slashing emissions. Among newer members, the common denominator for the sectors making progress is that they are all reducing ruminant meat procurement (but not all really bumping up their plant-based food procurement) but may follow the same path older members took and decrease other animal product purchases over time.  ↩

3. These animals are farmed and caught in vast numbers and likely experience poor welfare conditions (Waldhorn & Autric 2023, McKay, McAuliffe & Waldhorn 2023).  ↩

4. E.g., one study on classroom education showed a way to message about the climate impacts of meat reduction that resulted in reductions in individual consumption across species (Jalil et al. 2023). “The talk stressed that on average, meat has higher GHGs than plants (i.e. lentils, beans, peas, whole grains, fruits,

   vegetables, seeds, nuts). . . the intervention then pivoted to the public health benefits of reduced meat consumption because prior research indicates that many people have health misconceptions about meat that need to be addressed before initiating behavioral change, e.g. many people mistakenly believe that meat must be a part of a healthy diet and that plant-based sources of protein are inferior. This portion of the talk emphasized a simple “win-win” message: Reducing meat consumption can be good both for you and the planet.” (Supplementary material 2020 p2-3) ↩

5. 84% of the main courses, 60% of the snacks, and 50% of all desserts are vegan (ProVeg 2023). ↩

6. Though it’s worth noting that an amendment to this law appears to prohibit offering cell-cultured/cultivated meat. ↩

7. The project scope and time available to complete was limited by the client commissioning this work. We also had fewer contacts already in these countries compared to others. ↩

8. ProVeg was running a program in 110 UK schools to add meatless Mondays and daily meatless options (Wills 2021), which implies it's not a default assumption that schools already have meatless options (nevermind vegan options which seems even less likely given there is a petition asking the government to require daily vegan options). ↩

9. The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Effective Altruism Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018. Similar sentiments are discussed here and here. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).  ↩

10. We used food purchase proportions from the University of Victoria and US hospitals in North Central Regions States as placeholders given lack of time to get more accurate data. ↩

11. unless the school actively opts out ↩