Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the influence of information on consumers’ preferences and sensory perceptions of organic food using a sample of 301 Italian organic food consumers. Consumers stated their preferences for “core organic” attributes, labels and information on food products and performed blind and informed tests on strawberry yoghurts and cookies. Data were analysed using descriptive analysis, Mann-Whitney U tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Results revealed that consumers appreciate “core organic” attributes, like artisanal production and variability of sensory attributes. Comparing blind and informed tests, results showed that information affects the overall liking of products and consumers’ perception of product-specific sensory attributes. However, the influence of information on sensory perceptions depends on the product category, sensory attributes and the type of information provided.
Highlights
Food choice is one of the most frequent human activity that consumers do every day, and it is a very complicated behaviour because it is influenced by many interacting factors [1]
While in the absence of information, consumers evaluate food products according to their preferences and sensory attributes, in disclosed information conditions their choices may be influenced by the extrinsic attributes provided with food products [3,14,15]
Results show that information affects consumers’ preferences and sensory perceptions, but the effect depends on the product category, sensory attributes tested and the types of information provided
Summary
Food choice is one of the most frequent human activity that consumers do every day, and it is a very complicated behaviour because it is influenced by many interacting factors [1]. While in the absence of information, consumers evaluate food products according to their preferences (i.e. beliefs, attitudes, etc.) and sensory attributes, in disclosed information conditions their choices may be influenced by the extrinsic attributes provided with food products [3,14,15]. This is because information is capable of steering consumers’ evaluation since it can be used by consumers in their inference-making processes when choosing food products [3,16,17]. The interaction between extrinsic and intrinsic attributes affects consumers’ choices, as it is signalled by a large number of studies that investigated different food products [5,10,22,23,24]
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