Cultured Meat Adoption Intention in the Context of Sustainable Protein Transition: Evidence from Young Urban Meat-Eating Adults in Chad

The extant body of evidence pertaining to the acceptance of cultured meat in Sub-Saharan Africa remains limited. The present study examined the determinants of intention to adopt cultured meat among a sample of young, urban, meat-eating adults in Chad (n = 290, from a recruited sample of 304). This was achieved using a cross-sectional online survey. Hierarchical OLS with HC3-robust inference was estimated across five hypothesis blocks, complemented by dominance analysis, binary outcome sensitivity, and exploratory triangulation (Bayesian, elastic net, conditional random forest). Approximately half of the respondents expressed a willingness to try cultured meat (52.4%). The final model accounted for 30.6% of the intention variance (adjusted R2 = 0.188). Following Holm’s correction for multiple comparisons, the conventional-meat and knowledge blocks did not demonstrate a significant difference. The product beliefs (ΔR2 = 0.056, p = 0.022), affective risk barriers (ΔR2 = 0.086, p = 0.004), and value fit (ΔR2 = 0.039, p = 0.048) were found to be significant, with affective risk ranking first in dominance analysis (22.8%). Binary sensitivity analysis demonstrated acceptable discrimination (AUC = 0.744), although no block remained significant after correction. Exploratory analyses yielded convergent results, including notably robust Bayesian support for excluding the conventional-meat block (BF01 = 1.66 × 1012). Sensitivity power analysis confirmed adequate power (≥0.80) for the significant blocks, but indicated that the conventional-meat non-significance may partly reflect limited power (estimated power = 0.47). Cultured meat adoption intention was more strongly associated with affective risk and value fit appraisals than with conventional meat purchase priorities. This suggests that acceptance strategies should prioritise risk reduction, trust-building, and perceived value. The findings should be interpreted as applying to a digitally connected, young, urban, meat-eating, predominantly tertiary-educated early-adopter-like segment (90.5% with university-level education; 72.7% residing in cities of more than 500,000 inhabitants), rather than to the general Chadian population.