Don’t Say “Beans” When Promoting Plant Protein to Family Meal Planners

Purpose: To identify “headlines” that would engage recipients to consider plant protein over red meat. Design: Mail and web survey. Setting: Urban Minnesota community. Subjects: 144 survey respondents from our health plan and community program distribution lists who live with at least 1 other person and eat meat. Intervention: We asked respondents how likely they would be to click on each of 24 headlines with a motivator (eating plant protein for health vs for environmental reasons) and a barrier (family preferences, knowledge about plant proteins, or cooking skills). 16 headlines contained the word “beans”. Measures: We created categorical variables for each headline construct: (1) motivator, (2) barrier, and (3) reference to beans. Using a mixed model with random effects, we compared, for each construct, respondents’ self-reported likelihood to click on a headline. Results: Health-related headlines performed significantly better than environmental headlines (P =.0019, 95% CI.01,.11). Family-oriented headlines performed slightly better than skills-oriented (P =.0927, 95% CI -.01,.11) and knowledge-oriented (P =.0960, 95% CI -.01,.11) headlines. Headlines containing the word “beans” performed significantly worse than those not containing “beans” (P <.0001, 95% CI -.22, -.12). Conclusions: The population represented by our survey respondents report being most likely to click on headlines that emphasize health and family. They report they are significantly less likely to click on headlines that promote beans.