Sensory profiles and mothers’ expectations and beliefs about age appropriate snacks for infants and toddlers in Singapore

Abstract

Complementary foods provide many nutritional benefits to infants as they transition from a milk-based to solid-food diet. The appropriate introduction of solid and semi-solid foods exposes infants to a variety of tastes and textures, aids the development of oral processing skills and promotes acceptance of a diverse diet in later childhood. While commercially available infant complementary foods serve as a convenient option for parents and caregivers, their appropriateness for different ages has been called into question. We sought to assess the consistency of the sensory properties of commercially available complementary foods designed for different ages and explore whether sensory intensity changes with front-of-pack age recommendations in Singapore. First, we used a sensory panel to characterise perceptual differences across a range of commercially available infant and toddler complementary foods (n = 25) from three categories (biscuit/wafer, rice extruded snack, and puree/porridge/ready-to-eat meal) and establish the relationship between perceived sensory differences and the manufacturer’s age-recommendations (5 to 16 months). Separately, mothers’ (n = 212) perception of a similar range of infant complementary foods was evaluated to explore their expected sensory properties in response to labelled age-recommendations for each category. Results suggested that there were significant differences in the sensory perceptions of different infant complementary foods within each category (p ≤ 0.05). However, there was no distinct relationships between the taste and texture profiles and age recommendations for biscuit/wafer and rice extruded snack infant foods, whereas there was uniform alignment between increased intensity of sensory properties and increasing age recommendations for puree/porridge/ready-to-eat meals. By contrast, mothers’ expected sensory perceptions of infant complementary foods were guided by product age recommendations across all categories, with intensity for expected taste and texture characteristics increasing with recommended age. Taken together, the findings suggest the need for closer alignment between product’s sensory properties and their recommended age for specific stages of infant and toddler development, as communicated to parents through front-of-pack labels.