ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
The big business of sustainable food production and consumption: Exploring the transition to alternative proteins.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Characteristics of built food environments associated with alternative protein food choices: a systematic review.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2024Pooled it
- Trends, challenges, and opportunities for the United States alternative meat and seafood sector: stakeholder-informed perspectives.NPJ science of food · 2026Article
- A method to identify positive tipping points to accelerate low-carbon transitions and actions to trigger them.Sustainability science · 2026Article
- Scientific and technological challenges of recombinant egg protein production.BMC biotechnology · 2025Review
- Nutritional Profiling and Labeling Practices of Plant-Based, Hybrid, and Animal-Based Dog Foods: A Study of European Pack Labels (2020-2024).Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Global Comparison and Future Trends of Major Food Proteins: Can Shellfish Contribute to Sustainable Food Security?Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Quality Attributes, Structural Characteristics, and Functional Properties of Brewer's Spent Grain Protein Concentrates as Affected by Alkaline and Pulsed Electric Field-Assisted Extraction.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Plant-Based Alternatives to Meat Products.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Public discourses of alternative protein foods in Facebook public pages' posts, 2014-2024.PloS one · 2025Article
- From Farms to Labs: The New Trend of Sustainable Meat Alternatives.Food science of animal resources · 2025Review
- Recent innovations for improving the techno-functional properties of plant-based egg analogs and egg-mimicking products to promote their industrialization and commercialization.Comprehensive reviews in food science and food safety · 2025Review
- A multicriteria analysis of meat and milk alternatives from nutritional, health, environmental, and cost perspectives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Sustainability of animal-sourced foods and plant-based alternatives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Addressing the 2050 demand for terrestrial animal source food.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Effectiveness, Challenges, and Environmental Impacts of New Food Strategies with Plant and Animal Protein Products.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- System transitions research and sustainable development: Challenges, progress, and prospects.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Sustainability transitions in consumption-production systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A widespread sense of the unsustainability of the food system has taken hold in recent years, leading to calls for fundamental change. The role of animal agriculture is central to many of these debates, leading to interest in the possibility of a "protein transition," whereby the production and consumption of animal-derived foods is replaced with plant-based substitutes or "alternative proteins." Despite the potential sustainability implications of this transition, the developmental trajectories and transformative potential of the associated technologies remain underexplored. This article sheds light on these dynamics by addressing two questions: 1) how have alternative protein innovations developed over the past three decades, and 2) what explains their more recent acceleration? To answer these questions, the article makes an empirical analysis of four alternative protein innovations, and the partial destabilization of the animal agriculture system between 1990 and 2021, guided by the multi-level perspective. The analysis highlights an intensification in corporate engagement with alternative protein development and diffusion. This intensification is judged to be consistent with the beginnings of a wider corporate reorientation, occurring alongside a rise in pressures on the animal agriculture system, notably an increasing scientific consensus and societal awareness of the links between climate change and meat-intensive diets. The paper demonstrates how differences in technological maturity across the niche innovations have resulted in potentially transformative pressures, which are consistent with an emerging sustainability transition, manifesting differently in terms of the extent of diffusion of the alternative protein niches.
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Registered trials
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