The most important factor in food and beverage purchasing decisions is great taste, according to research published in 2024 by the International Food Information Council. This comes from Rachel Toner, founder and technical director of Chalfont, Pennsylvania-based Taste Strategy, speaking on Sensory Science Essentials.
The sensory experience needs data to back it up, said Toner, speaking earlier this week at CSP’s Convenience Retailing University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Smell, appearance, sound, touch and texture and taste all need data to back them up.
Taste ranks above convenience, price, healthfulness and sustainability, she said.
“So, if taste is the most important factor, why are we not spending more time and effort and not investing more in understanding how our products taste with our consumers and how it directly impacts what they’re purchasing,” she said.
“Would you feel comfortable walking into a meeting with your boss and not having information on sales or gross profit?” Toner asked. “I don’t think you would. So, why is it OK for us to deliver products to our consumers without the basic understanding of how our products taste, and I’m here to argue that it’s not OK. Our consumers deserve to at least have some sort of information about the way that their products should taste; they expect that from us.”
Get Feedback
Toner said c-store retailers should be using their consumers to get feedback “because they’re the ones who are going to drive our business.”
To get better, retailers must stop assuming what the consumer desires. “We have to stop mind reading and think about what consumers want,” she said.
Research shows that retailers are very overconfident in their ability to understand how people feel and what people perceive, Toner said. “If you’re married, we know how this goes,” she said. “We need to ask. It’s that simple.”
“We have to remember that they’re the ones consuming the product, and as suppliers of food and beverage products to consumers, eating is quite an intimate experience, right?” Toner said. “People are trusting you to put food in their bodies. So, being able to under the understand this experience and getting your customers to trust you is really important.”
Sensory Data
Sensory data is an asset to retailers, helping them build trust with consumers, she said.
“The more you deliver on the sensory experience and the consumer experience, the more they’re going to trust you, come back and purchase more things,” she said, adding that sensory data informs decision-making.
“You have data—there’s a point where you can have too much information and that’s not what I’m talking about today—but sensory data can provide you with information to make informed decisions,” Toner said.
Like a thermometer, sensory scientists use people to measure the sensory experience, she said, “because products can’t talk.” In doing a sensory evaluation, there’s evaluator to whom a food or beverage product is given.
“They put it in their mouth and it invokes the sense sensation, and this sensation comes from the five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing,” Toner said. “And then what’s important is that it’s not just the sensation, it’s how it’s processed in the brain. You’re actively making an assessment of that product.”
There are many other factors that play a role in the way consumers perceive, Toner said. “But I like this because I don’t think we realize how much our sense is playing a role in consumption. It’s silent.”
Eating
A consumer picks up a bag of barbecue chips and start eating. “They might open the bag,” she said. “There’s the crunch of the bag, they touch whatever packaging there is and they pick it out, and they might look at that chip and be like, ‘Is it barbecue? Does this match my expectations of what I purchased?’ Then they take it out and put it in their mouth. You may think that taste is the first thing that you’re experiencing, but really it’s a tactile sensation in your fingers. You’re touching it. There might be some oily residue. You start getting it close to your mouth.
“You smell it first. You’re actively smelling in your mouth,” Toner continued. “It’s touching your tongue. Tactile sensation; texture is tactile sensation. You’re biting it. You hear the sound of the chip.”
Retailers need to be thinking about all these aspects when developing products, Toner said. “There are also many other factors that impact sensory perception—convenience retail especially,” she said. “Environmental factors play a huge role in the way people perceive food. They come and they park at the gas pump if you got gas.
“They go in your stores,” she continued. “How clean your store is is going to impact the way people perceive your foods and beverages. How clean your bathroom is impacts the way people perceive your foodservice experience. The smell of your store. All of those things are going to impact the way people perceive.”
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