When Food Gets Political: How Does News Drive Green Food Offerings?

We study how social media publicity affects the early-stage adoption of sustainable food technologies by local businesses. Understanding this connection is challenging because of the lack of empirical measurement of local business decisions at scale and, more importantly, the endogeneity of social media publicity to unobserved local demand shocks. Focusing on the case of impossible meat products, we devise a unique location-specific adoption metric based on social media announcements between 2015 and 2019. We propose a novel identification strategy that leverages the quasirandom variations of county-quarter-level news production for different topics to causally identify the linkage between social media publicity and adoption. We find that local news coverage of impossible meat products increases local restaurants’ and stores’ adoption of the focal green food technology. Notably, the social media news effect on adoption is higher among more liberal regions, and news content about producer financials was the main contributor to identifying the causal effect of news on local businesses’ adoption of impossible meat products.

History: Tat Chan served as the senior editor.

Funding: Partial financial support was received from the NET Institute (2023 Summer Grant) to support academic studies.

Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2025.0134.