Project
Call for Partners | Sustainable Liking - Successful transitions towards sustainable and healthy food habits
To foster healthy people and a healthy planet, a transition is needed towards more sustainable consumer diets. Replacing animal protein with plant protein would contribute significantly to this transition, but this is a challenge as it impacts the familiar flavour and texture profiles consumers are accustomed to. How can consumers not only get used to these changes but also become more inclined to consistently re-purchase sustainable plant-based products, ultimately transitioning to a plant-based diet? The project Sustainable Liking will focus on the interplay between sensory experiences, long-term liking, and habit formation. By developing effective strategies, this project aims to facilitate consumers’ transition towards healthy plant-forward diets.
Approach of “Sustainable Liking”
Food choices are largely driven by habits, which are formed by a combination of factors such as sensory appeal, familiarity, costs, attitudes, and contextual elements. Habits are difficult to break, as they proceed in a relatively automatic way, with little or no consideration of competing alternatives. Moreover, expectations about what a product or meal should taste like based on experience and familiarity interfere with habit change. It is difficult to predict the long-term successes of newly developed products. Possible mechanisms behind successful habit change are the degree to which a new food fits an existing habit and the effect of repeated consumption on liking the food. Why liking for some novel foods increases over time, whereas liking for other foods decreases remains unclear and seems to be product-specific.
This project aims to gain understanding of the interplay between sensory perception, long-term liking, and habit formation to identify effective strategies that facilitate consumers’ transition towards more sustainable diets. Key sensory drivers and barriers for successful long-term plant-based food transitions will be identified. New strategies will be developed to steer consumer behaviour toward more sustainable food choices that are maintained in the long-term. These insights will provide guidelines for the development and communication of new sustainable food products that help to change existing food habits (e.g. from a more animal-based to a plant-forward diet), resulting in reduced costs due to lower market failures.
The fundamental scientific understanding of consumers’ food habits, i.e. how they evolve and change, will create new opportunities for the food industry to be successful in providing sustainably produced and healthy food products that consumers are willing to buy repeatedly.
Partners
We are looking for partners in the food industry, ingredient suppliers, caterers, restaurants, retailers interested in plant-based transitions.