Taste Your Consumer Audience. How Sensory Expertise Influences Food Choice

Presentation of the thesis(es) covered by the paper – This paper explores how individual differences in food literacy and sensory perception influence consumer behavior, particularly in food choices. We investigate how varying levels of expertise in sensory analysis and education in human nutrition science impact these choices, with implications for brand strategy and consumer profiling. Our study is based on an empirical analysis of responses from 185 Italian expertise in sensory analysis, human nutrition science, and naive consumers. We observed how nutrition science experts consider taste less important (χ2 test p-value: 0.000) and observe nutritional labels (χ2 test p-value: 0.035) and types of nutrients (χ2 test p-value: 0.000) more frequently than other consumer groups. In contrast, sensory analysis experts assign higher importance to production methods than others (χ2 test p-value: 0.000), product origins (χ2 test p-value: 0.000) and the presence of additives (χ2 test p-value: 0.026), during their selection process. Sensory perception skills could explain high levels of procedural food literacy (t-test p.value: 0.002) which is also associated to morning chronotype (t-test p.value: 0.0019). Interestingly, age, gender, BMI, and chronotype do not correlate with sensory capacity (t-tests p-value > 0.15 for the four dimensions. As such, sensory capacity offers a distinct and orthogonal dimension to existing measures. We posit that marketers, product developers, and brand managers should pay greater attention to individual differences in sensory perception. We suggest and promote the integration of neurophysiological profiling methods in designing new products and brand identities