Consumer Disgust and Acceptance of Cultured Meat: Food-Oriented Design Strategies and Future Directions

Cultured meat offers sustainability and ethical advantages, yet consumer disgust remains a defining obstacle to its mainstream acceptance. While prior studies have primarily addressed this issue from psychological and communication perspectives, this review aims to reframe consumer disgust as a design-relevant challenge grounded in material properties, sensory attributes, and food processing considerations. To this end, we introduce and elaborate an acceptance-by-design framework that systematically links consumer expectations related to texture, flavor, nutrition, and transparency to measurable critical quality attributes and food-relevant design strategies, including structuring approaches, metabolic modulation, and process control. From this perspective, disgust is interpreted not as an unpredictable emotional response but as an informative signal of design misalignment that can guide food formulation and engineering decisions. Although conceptual in nature, this review provides a structured mapping between consumer perception and measurable validation metrics, highlighting actionable pathways for integrating sensory evaluation, biochemical analysis, and consumer research. Overall, the manuscript positions consumer acceptance as an outcome that can be proactively embedded within food design, thereby supporting evidence-based trust development in cultured meat products.