Consumer acceptance of cultivated meat: a systematic review and integrated perception-to-strategy framework
Christine Wan Shean Liew, See Kwong Goh, Sarabjit Kaur Sidhu, Omkar DastanePurpose
This study synthesises research on consumer acceptance of cultivated meat (CM) and develops a framework explaining how contextual conditions shape the interpretation of product, market and legitimation cues, how inhibiting and enabling evaluations perform distinct functions, and how these processes relate to differentiated adoption outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi-method systematic review of 42 peer-reviewed empirical articles followed PRISMA guidelines. An antecedents-decisions-outcomes (ADO) synthesis mapped study-level relationships, while structural topic modelling (STM) identified corpus-level thematic structure and temporal development.
Findings
The synthesis shows that CM acceptance is not adequately explained as an additive balance of barriers and drivers. External cues acquire meaning through context-dependent evaluations, while inhibiting and enabling evaluations perform distinct, non-equivalent functions. STM confirmed persistent psychological inhibitors and revealed increasing attention to sensory, packaging, organisational, symbolic and willingness-to-pay themes. The resulting integrated perception-to-strategy (IPS) framework links contextual conditions and cue interpretation to asymmetric inhibiting-enabling processes and three analytically distinct outcomes: initial receptivity, market commitment and sustained adoption.
Practical implications
Firms and policymakers should coordinate resistance-reducing, legitimacy-building, value-generating and friction-reducing interventions across product design, food marketing, retailing and regulation.
Originality/value
The IPS framework extends determinant-based reviews by explaining CM acceptance as a context-dependent process rather than a cumulative balance of barriers and drivers. It distinguishes the functional roles of resistance reduction, legitimacy formation and value generation, positions context as shaping cue interpretation, and differentiates initial receptivity from more consequential adoption outcomes.