Anti-meat messaging has captured the hearts and pocketbooks of the young

OPINION:

Drawing in upwards of 100 million viewers, the Super Bowl is easily America’s most-watched television program. However, if consumer data is any indication, the big game (and the beer-and-wing fueled revelry that traditionally accompanies it) is changing.

Super Bowl viewership has declined since its 2015 peak, and even that year’s record 114.4 million viewers was an anomaly among stagnant ratings extending back to 2010. Sustained racial controversy, a lackluster halftime performance and history’s lowest scoring game likely won’t help turn things around soon. As far as consumption goes, Nielsen data indicates that fans are slowly swapping beer for spiked seltzer, with Super Bowl sales of the sparkling beverages up 300 percent since 2016. While chicken wings are still a staple, fresh and deli-cooked wings are up 15 percent and 31 percent, respectively, compared to dollar sales losses for frozen, premade wings. Yet even this tradition looks poised for a major change, as roughly 4-in-10 Americans say they’re skipping meat altogether in favor of plant-based foods.

Millennials and Generation Z, together the largest consumer cohort, are going meatless in record numbers. In fact, one-quarter of Americans aged 25 to 34 currently follow vegan or vegetarian diets. As Generation Z ages into a position of purchasing power, their preference for tofu and plant-based milks — which far exceeds that of any prior generation — are going to come into play in a major way. That means more meatless wings, more plant-based burgers and less market share for the meat industry writ large.

In large part, it’s a marketing problem.

Take the recent buzz around reducing meat consumption to combat global warming. In January alone, the medical journal the Lancet published two major reports arguing that eating less, if any, animal protein is the best path forward to feeding the global population a healthy and sustainable diet. The World Economic Forum chimed in with a white paper suggesting much of the same.

It should be no surprise that these messages are resonating among young consumers, who are particularly receptive to messaging around climate change. Gallup polling shows that three-quarters of young Americans believe in human-caused climate change, with 70 percent worrying about it regularly. For the youth, tying vegetarianism to global sustainability seems like a strong, uncontroversial strategy. Animal rights activists have taken notice, as have the companies trying to pass heavily processed soy sludge as meat.

However good fake meat’s marketing strategy, a meatless climate change strategy can’t live up to the hype. Data from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown that livestock comprises only about 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is also the only industry, aside from the closely related forestry sector, which has not increased greenhouse gas production over the last two decades. Yet rather than highlight the successes of modern agriculture, like biogas digesters converting manure to renewable energy or using seaweed feed to cut livestock methane emissions by a third, the meat industry has elected to call its products sustainable and wash its hands of any further conversation.

For the consumers who can barely remember a time before the Internet and smartphones, empty claims of sustainability do little when they’re bombarded by articles, reports and infographics about the myriad ways that meat production contributes to pollution, emissions and poor health.

Here’s a radical idea: Rather than investing in a seal of sustainability that conveys little more than the fact that the marketing team figured out a new buzz word, meat producers should speak to their customers using the same successful language as their competitors.

Beef Checkoff took a step in the right direction with its sustainability fact sheet. However, any public awareness program that relies on consumers engaging with a chatbot before they can discover that “U.S. beef has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world” is a waste of industry resources.

Why not instead engage millennials with a well-publicized Ted talk about the radical technological changes that have enabled farmers to feed 2.5 billion more people using fewer resources and generating fewer emissions? Or highlight among the growing health and fitness communities that animal protein is the most complete protein and an easy “clean” source of vital nutrients? It’s a public relations failure that one of the most natural components of the human diet is being edged out of its health halo by fake meat products that are high in added sodium, heavily processed, and can cause severe allergic reactions (not to mention the far more common gastric distress).

The answer to meat’s marketing problem is to recognize that there’s a problem in the first place. The industry must speak to consumers with the acknowledgment that anti-meat messaging beat them to the table. In less than a generation, companies that chose to maintain the messaging status quo will be left wondering one thing: Where’s the beef?

• Richard Berman is the president of Berman and Co., a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.