To me, the premise of this study is just silly.

They applied these terms to gift baskets. How many people buy gift baskets for themselves? Gift baskets are so expensive relative to the amount of food in them that most people who buy them will buy them with a gift recipient in mind.

Unless I completely missed something in the article, I don't recall anything even hinting that the gift baskets were meant to be a gift for the person choosing them (such as how a business will sometimes provide employees with a brochure of choices for an end of year gift, implying that the person who chooses the gift basket will be the one consuming the food in it), so my guess is that the first assumption is the right one - that the ones choosing the baskets were NOT the ones who would ultimately be receiving them.

So when buying a gift basket, if you're basing your choice on the description, you purchase it based on what you think the recipient would appreciate about it. You might buy a gift basket labeled vegan or plant based for someone you know for sure is vegan. You might buy a gift basket labeled healthy for someone you know for sure is on a diet (or for someone you wish ate a healthier diet). For the sustainable label - you choose that for someone who you think would appreciate that about their gift basket, even if it's not right there on the label.

Gift giving is almost always a game of making your "best guess" as to what the recipient would like.


The percentage of people in the US who declare themselves vegan is only 3%, with 5% vegetarians, so I'm quite surprised that they managed to get 20% and 27% choosing the vegan and plant based basket descriptions. Healthy and sustainable are more vague descriptions - even then, the number only rose to 40%... Which means that 60% were still choosing the baskets with animal products.


But that brings up other questions - The meat in gift baskets is often summer sausages or dried deli meats, and not all meat eaters actually like those. The cheese in gift baskets is often smoked or hard cheeses - not everyone likes those either, so would often choose a fruit, nut, or cracker basket instead.

They've said nothing about the pricing on these baskets and the size of the vegan, plant based/"healthy" and "sustainable" baskets as opposed to the ones containing even a single animal product. If you're buying a gift basket, are you going to go for the small basket that has 3 different types of meat and 4 different types of cheese, but is 1/4 the size of the basket that costs the same price, but contains 3 different types of crackers and 4 different fruits? Some would, but most wouldn't. An impressively large size gift for the price is often the primary influence in choosing a gift basket.