Conference Agenda

Changing diets toward plant-based foods (PBF) is widely viewed as an important complement to production-side climate mitigation policies. Yet despite growing awareness of the environmental and health benefits of plant-based foods, consumer adoption remains limited. This paper examines whether scalable consumer-facing interventions can bridge this gap. We conduct a pre-registered randomized natural field experiment using a smartphone household-accounting application in Japan. The study combines survey responses from 4,863 consumers with linked receipt-level purchase data from 3,777 individuals, generating approximately 150,000 individual-week observations and more than one million purchase records.　Participants were exposed to informational interventions emphasizing environmental impacts, health benefits, or personalized purchase-history feedback, with or without cash-back incentives for plant-based food purchases. Survey results indicate that several interventions substantially reduced uncertainty about plant-based foods and increased consumers’ stated willingness to substitute away from conventional meat products. However, these attitudinal changes translated only weakly into actual purchasing behavior. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses show little evidence of sustained increases in either the probability of purchasing plant-based foods or expenditure on such products. Positive effects, when observed, were modest and concentrated among a small subset of treatments, particularly those combining financial incentives with personalized feedback. Most effects attenuated rapidly and disappeared after the interventions ended. These findings suggest that changing consumer beliefs may be easier than changing consumer purchases. Although several interventions altered perceptions of plant-based foods and increased stated substitution intentions, their effects on realized purchases were small and short-lived. The results therefore provide field-experimental evidence of a substantial intention–behavior gap in sustainable food consumption and raise questions about the effectiveness of low-cost consumer-facing policies as a tool for large-scale dietary change.