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Texture is an area of increasing focus among food companies aiming to zero in on that perfectly crispy crunch or silky smoothness. Christine Kalvenes, vice president of innovation for Frito-Lay, and WSJ's Anne-Marie Chaker, join Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.
Are you a cruncher? Or a "smoosher"?
Some people crave the perfectly crispy crunch of a cracker or a salty chip. Others yearn for the silky smoothness of a chocolate mousse.
Food companies are paying closer attention to consumer's texture preferences as they drill down on attributes that make new products stand out on store shelves. Food developers are putting specific textures at the top of the list of traits they want to achieve, and they are emphasizing "mouth feel" in descriptions on packaging.
Texture "is just as important as taste or flavor, in many cases," says Jack Fortnum, president of the North American business at Ingredion Inc., a Westchester, Ill., food-ingredient processor that holds hundreds of consumer taste tests a year. It says the tests can, for example, help clients calibrate the precise amount of crunch in a new product. There were 20,790 new food packages world-wide making a texture claim in 2012, roughly double the number in 2008, according to Netherlands-based Innova Market Insights.
To build on the "tooth-rattling crunch" it says 20-something males crave, PepsiCo's Frito-Lay unit launched bigger and thicker chips last year for its Doritos' Jacked line. Yogurt maker Chobani Inc. in January launched Chobani Flip, which pairs a combination of ingredients including toasted almonds, graham-cracker pieces and praline pecans with a yogurt cup.
Some companies are combining textures, adding crunch or chew to drinks. Carlsbad, Calif.-based Mamma Chia offers nine "vitality" beverages that suspend whole chia seeds in fruit juice.
Consumer researchers Jacqueline Beckley and Melissa Jeltema say there may be "unexpressed need" behind people's preferences for different food textures.
The two researchers, founder and vice president, respectively, at Understanding and Insight Group, of Denville, N.J., studied 500 consumers in December, showing them photos of foods and recording their responses to statements such as "I like foods that I can smoosh. I even smoosh foods that I can chew." (Smooshing, according to the two researchers, is a way of manipulating food between the tongue and roof of the mouth without using the teeth.)
Consumers, they found, fall generally into one of four major categories of texture preference and "mouth behavior." "Chewers," the biggest group at 43%, enjoy the prolonged chewing action involved in eating, say, a soft cookie.
"Crunchers," at 33%, favor the sound and force of a bite, as with hard granola bars. "Smooshers," at 16%, are into the smooth and creamy feeling, whether from a sweet dessert or mashed potatoes. And "suckers," at 8%, prefer the long-lasting hard-candy experience. "Companies, if they understood these differences, could better develop particular products for different groups," Dr. Jeltema says.
Many companies see texture as a way to address consumers' emotional reasons for eating. "If it's been a more stressful day, a person will eat crunchy things that compact into smoother things in your mouth," says Christine Kalvenes, vice president of innovation for Frito-Lay. "That helps with that emotional transition." In the late evening, a person may want to "come down into a more smoothing moment."
For the Doritos "Jacked" line, Frito-Lay wanted to appease its core consumers, 20-something men, who are "always looking for the next bolder thing" in snacking, Ms. Kalvenes says. The company explored how thick it could go with the chip, and how big. They settled on a chip that was 40% bigger and thicker and provided a crunch that "rattles all the way through your ears," Ms. Kalvenes said. "It breaks into little shards in your mouth that continue to crunch all the way through."
You "don't eat Doritos when you want to be comforted and soothed," Ms. Kalvenes adds.
Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey cookies offer an extra-soft texture for chewy-cookie lovers. "There are people that …wanted more of a softer texture but with a little bit of surprise," says Amelia Strobel, senior director of consumer insights and strategy for Chips Ahoy! maker Mondelez International Inc.
Midwesterners prefer soft cookies while Northeasterners prefer hard cookies, Mondelez says. In 2011, the company developed a concept it dubbed "middle"—a chocolate-chip cookie with an extra-soft filling.
The result, Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey cookies, launched in 2011 with
Chocofudge and Megafudge fillings; Caramel was added last year and Brownie last month. The fillings move the cookies out of after-school snack territory, Ms. Strobel says. "The way it coats your mouth a little more, it tends to pull you a little more into an evening treat."
Werther's Original, a hard-candy line from German confectioner August Storck KG, knows all about suckers. Sucking on candy "forces you to take a moment to wind down," says Kelly Cook, director of marketing. Hard-candy lovers tend to roll the candy around, letting the flavor coat the inside of the mouth. "This is their stress relief," Ms. Cook says. This month, Werther's is launching a Sugar-Free Caramel Chocolate flavor.
General Mills Inc. recently turned its new-product focus to the surprising statistic that about a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds don't eat breakfast, making them part of the larger population of "breakfast skippers." "They want the nutrition of a bowl of cereal and milk, but want to take it in the car or have it while they are doing their makeup," says Betsy Frost, marketing manager.
The company considered the idea of a breakfast bar. Then came the idea for a liquid drink, something satiating and nutritious. "We came up with a tight range [of texture]. 'Smooth' was within this range, and 'filling' meant a little more thickness," she says. "But when we gave [consumers] a thicker shake, they didn't like it."
The shake proved to be too thick to drink through a straw. "Too much work," Ms. Frost says. The shake General Mills launched this year, called Bfast, is less thick, strawless and available in chocolate, berry and vanilla flavors. The boxes say, "Chug it."
Luigi DePasquale, 25, a store supervisor at Logan Airport in Boston, says his 3:30 a.m. alarm usually means he skips breakfast. He tried the Bfast shakes in a promotion and "fell in love with them," he says. "It's like a thick chocolate milk." Other textures are less appealing in the morning, he says. "Protein bars make your mouth dry, and a lot of protein shakes have that grit at the bottom."
Diamond Foods' Emerald Nuts entered the cereal aisle in 2011 with Breakfast On the Go, single-serve packets of nuts with things like granola bits, dried fruit and chocolate-covered espresso beans. It took two years of experimenting. "We were trying to find the Goldilocks solution," says Craig Tokusato, senior vice president for nuts at Diamond Foods. "What's the right level of chew, what's the right level of crunch."
With the explosion in sales of Greek yogurt, supermarket yogurt aisles now are home to more textures, whether whipped products, creamy products or beverages. Stonyfield, a unit of Groupe Danone, has launched "Blends" yogurt, which is less thick than Greek yogurt but more thick than "traditional, plain Jane yogurt," says Amy Elkes, insights and innovation manager. It was a challenge to find the right way to describe the texture. "We toyed with 'la crème' or things like that," she says, but in the end called it "thick and creamy."
Rituals Make Our Food More Flavorful
http://nyti.ms/15SOmcV
Do you always fold a New York slice in all its oily glory? Is a whole lobster best relished in this order: legs, claws then succulent tail? Do you eat Oreos middle first? Or dunked in milk?
Far from being mere quirks of personality, rituals like these may actually enhance how much people savor what they eat or drink, new research shows. Flavor is intensified. The meal is enjoyed more. It may be one reason why birthday cake is savored more than the stumbled-upon 4 p.m. brownie, because of the singing and candle blowing that precedes it.
The researchers found that even simple rituals, which they defined as “a series of behaviors that are seemingly irrelevant to the act that follows,” like scraping wooden chopsticks together or tapping a soda can before pulling the tab, raised participants’ interest in what they subsequently ate or drank. And rituals appeared capable of enhancing the enjoyment not just of treats like chocolate or lemonade but even baby carrots.
Culinary rituals have long been studied by anthropologists and sociologists. But this study, a series of four experiments published recently online in Psychological Science, actually tested the notion that ritualized gestures enhance ensuing consumption. The experiments were carried out at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and Harvard University.
For the first experiment, 52 students were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group, participants were asked to break a chocolate bar in half, wrapper and all, then to open one of the halves and eat it, followed by unwrapping the remaining half and eating that. The other group relaxed for a bit then ate the bar.
The camp that followed the two-step ritual rated their pleasure higher, and the chocolate more flavorful, than those who just ate their bars. They also said they would be willing to pay 25 cents more, on average, for the bar and took longer to savor it.
The second experiment, of 105 students, investigated whether any old movement had positive effects compared with another ritual devised by the researchers. This time lowly carrots, rather than chocolate, were used.
Before eating a carrot, some of the students always performed a standard ritual, which involved knocking twice before grabbing a bag of baby carrots, followed by another two knocks, taking a deep breath, and eating a carrot. Others performed that sequence only once, instead performing other gestures like turning their heads, snapping their fingers and clenching their fists.
To see if waiting would heighten anticipation for a four-calorie root crop, some students had to wait between carrot No. 2 and No. 3. Others didn’t. Incredibly, repeating the knocking-breathing ritual heightened subjects’ anticipation of a mini carrot.
The rituals concocted by researchers were silly-looking and deliberately irrelevant to the eating or drinking that followed, but nevertheless proved powerful. “Compared to just doing random gestures, doing nice systematic gestures brings them into a mindset that they are performing a ritual, and that led participants to enjoy carrots more than they would otherwise,” said Kathleen Vohs, the lead author of the paper and a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota.
Another experiment found that watching someone perform a ritual, say removing the wrapping on a wine bottle and uncorking it, does not heighten a spectator’s relish of their glass of zinfandel — only the pleasure of the bottle uncorker is enhanced. For the study, researchers had people mix lemonade and found that the act enhanced enjoyment for a drink mixer. But people who watched someone else prepare lemonade did not find the drink as flavorful.
A final experiment asked students how fun or interesting eating the chocolate was, confirmed that one reason food rituals enhance flavor and enjoyment is their ability to focus people’s interest on the ensuing consumption. The researchers called this focus “involvement.”
The study’s findings raise intriguing possibilities. Could rituals make often-maligned vegetables like broccoli worth savoring? Will my preschooler savor green beans if I start framing the border of his plate with them or if we sing a ditty in their honor before digging in?
“I love the concept that rituals increase the ability to savor food,” said Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic Family Health Center in Wooster, Ohio, who specializes in eating behavior, adding, “This study has great potential to help people create rituals and to savor food and choose healthier foods.”
Dr. Albers cited one of her clients, a woman who peeled an apple with a knife in a circular fashion — a technique she had learned from her mother as a child. “There’s a meditative way that she peels it, so by the end, she’s craving that apple,” she explained.
Dr. Albers, the author of “Eating Mindfully,” noted that rituals may also help in portion control, something the University of Minnesota researchers did not address in their experiments. She noted that in a small randomized controlled trial at the University of Texas in Austin, researchers found that teaching restaurant diners to focus on awareness of hunger and taste, along with other strategies, was effective at promoting weight management. “When you savor food you enjoy it more, and sometimes you eat less,” she said.
Certainly not all eating experiences will improve with a few knocks on a table and deep breaths. Rituals may augment flavor, but there’s a potential downside, the researchers caution. For some eaters, they wrote, “boosting the flavor of some tastes may be offputting.”
Here’s to hoping more green-beany beans won’t be one of them.
Texture is an area of increasing focus among food companies aiming to zero in on that perfectly crispy crunch or silky smoothness. Christine Kalvenes, vice president of innovation for Frito-Lay, and WSJ's Anne-Marie Chaker, join Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.
Are you a cruncher? Or a "smoosher"?
Some people crave the perfectly crispy crunch of a cracker or a salty chip. Others yearn for the silky smoothness of a chocolate mousse.
Food companies are paying closer attention to consumer's texture preferences as they drill down on attributes that make new products stand out on store shelves. Food developers are putting specific textures at the top of the list of traits they want to achieve, and they are emphasizing "mouth feel" in descriptions on packaging.
Texture "is just as important as taste or flavor, in many cases," says Jack Fortnum, president of the North American business at Ingredion Inc., a Westchester, Ill., food-ingredient processor that holds hundreds of consumer taste tests a year. It says the tests can, for example, help clients calibrate the precise amount of crunch in a new product. There were 20,790 new food packages world-wide making a texture claim in 2012, roughly double the number in 2008, according to Netherlands-based Innova Market Insights.
To build on the "tooth-rattling crunch" it says 20-something males crave, PepsiCo's Frito-Lay unit launched bigger and thicker chips last year for its Doritos' Jacked line. Yogurt maker Chobani Inc. in January launched Chobani Flip, which pairs a combination of ingredients including toasted almonds, graham-cracker pieces and praline pecans with a yogurt cup.
Some companies are combining textures, adding crunch or chew to drinks. Carlsbad, Calif.-based Mamma Chia offers nine "vitality" beverages that suspend whole chia seeds in fruit juice.
Consumer researchers Jacqueline Beckley and Melissa Jeltema say there may be "unexpressed need" behind people's preferences for different food textures.
The two researchers, founder and vice president, respectively, at Understanding and Insight Group, of Denville, N.J., studied 500 consumers in December, showing them photos of foods and recording their responses to statements such as "I like foods that I can smoosh. I even smoosh foods that I can chew." (Smooshing, according to the two researchers, is a way of manipulating food between the tongue and roof of the mouth without using the teeth.)
Consumers, they found, fall generally into one of four major categories of texture preference and "mouth behavior." "Chewers," the biggest group at 43%, enjoy the prolonged chewing action involved in eating, say, a soft cookie.
"Crunchers," at 33%, favor the sound and force of a bite, as with hard granola bars. "Smooshers," at 16%, are into the smooth and creamy feeling, whether from a sweet dessert or mashed potatoes. And "suckers," at 8%, prefer the long-lasting hard-candy experience. "Companies, if they understood these differences, could better develop particular products for different groups," Dr. Jeltema says.
Many companies see texture as a way to address consumers' emotional reasons for eating. "If it's been a more stressful day, a person will eat crunchy things that compact into smoother things in your mouth," says Christine Kalvenes, vice president of innovation for Frito-Lay. "That helps with that emotional transition." In the late evening, a person may want to "come down into a more smoothing moment."
For the Doritos "Jacked" line, Frito-Lay wanted to appease its core consumers, 20-something men, who are "always looking for the next bolder thing" in snacking, Ms. Kalvenes says. The company explored how thick it could go with the chip, and how big. They settled on a chip that was 40% bigger and thicker and provided a crunch that "rattles all the way through your ears," Ms. Kalvenes said. "It breaks into little shards in your mouth that continue to crunch all the way through."
You "don't eat Doritos when you want to be comforted and soothed," Ms. Kalvenes adds.
Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey cookies offer an extra-soft texture for chewy-cookie lovers. "There are people that …wanted more of a softer texture but with a little bit of surprise," says Amelia Strobel, senior director of consumer insights and strategy for Chips Ahoy! maker Mondelez International Inc.
Midwesterners prefer soft cookies while Northeasterners prefer hard cookies, Mondelez says. In 2011, the company developed a concept it dubbed "middle"—a chocolate-chip cookie with an extra-soft filling.
The result, Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey cookies, launched in 2011 with
Chocofudge and Megafudge fillings; Caramel was added last year and Brownie last month. The fillings move the cookies out of after-school snack territory, Ms. Strobel says. "The way it coats your mouth a little more, it tends to pull you a little more into an evening treat."
Werther's Original, a hard-candy line from German confectioner August Storck KG, knows all about suckers. Sucking on candy "forces you to take a moment to wind down," says Kelly Cook, director of marketing. Hard-candy lovers tend to roll the candy around, letting the flavor coat the inside of the mouth. "This is their stress relief," Ms. Cook says. This month, Werther's is launching a Sugar-Free Caramel Chocolate flavor.
General Mills Inc. recently turned its new-product focus to the surprising statistic that about a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds don't eat breakfast, making them part of the larger population of "breakfast skippers." "They want the nutrition of a bowl of cereal and milk, but want to take it in the car or have it while they are doing their makeup," says Betsy Frost, marketing manager.
The company considered the idea of a breakfast bar. Then came the idea for a liquid drink, something satiating and nutritious. "We came up with a tight range [of texture]. 'Smooth' was within this range, and 'filling' meant a little more thickness," she says. "But when we gave [consumers] a thicker shake, they didn't like it."
The shake proved to be too thick to drink through a straw. "Too much work," Ms. Frost says. The shake General Mills launched this year, called Bfast, is less thick, strawless and available in chocolate, berry and vanilla flavors. The boxes say, "Chug it."
Luigi DePasquale, 25, a store supervisor at Logan Airport in Boston, says his 3:30 a.m. alarm usually means he skips breakfast. He tried the Bfast shakes in a promotion and "fell in love with them," he says. "It's like a thick chocolate milk." Other textures are less appealing in the morning, he says. "Protein bars make your mouth dry, and a lot of protein shakes have that grit at the bottom."
Diamond Foods' Emerald Nuts entered the cereal aisle in 2011 with Breakfast On the Go, single-serve packets of nuts with things like granola bits, dried fruit and chocolate-covered espresso beans. It took two years of experimenting. "We were trying to find the Goldilocks solution," says Craig Tokusato, senior vice president for nuts at Diamond Foods. "What's the right level of chew, what's the right level of crunch."
With the explosion in sales of Greek yogurt, supermarket yogurt aisles now are home to more textures, whether whipped products, creamy products or beverages. Stonyfield, a unit of Groupe Danone, has launched "Blends" yogurt, which is less thick than Greek yogurt but more thick than "traditional, plain Jane yogurt," says Amy Elkes, insights and innovation manager. It was a challenge to find the right way to describe the texture. "We toyed with 'la crème' or things like that," she says, but in the end called it "thick and creamy."
Rituals Make Our Food More Flavorful
http://nyti.ms/15SOmcV
Do you always fold a New York slice in all its oily glory? Is a whole lobster best relished in this order: legs, claws then succulent tail? Do you eat Oreos middle first? Or dunked in milk?
Far from being mere quirks of personality, rituals like these may actually enhance how much people savor what they eat or drink, new research shows. Flavor is intensified. The meal is enjoyed more. It may be one reason why birthday cake is savored more than the stumbled-upon 4 p.m. brownie, because of the singing and candle blowing that precedes it.
The researchers found that even simple rituals, which they defined as “a series of behaviors that are seemingly irrelevant to the act that follows,” like scraping wooden chopsticks together or tapping a soda can before pulling the tab, raised participants’ interest in what they subsequently ate or drank. And rituals appeared capable of enhancing the enjoyment not just of treats like chocolate or lemonade but even baby carrots.
Culinary rituals have long been studied by anthropologists and sociologists. But this study, a series of four experiments published recently online in Psychological Science, actually tested the notion that ritualized gestures enhance ensuing consumption. The experiments were carried out at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and Harvard University.
For the first experiment, 52 students were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group, participants were asked to break a chocolate bar in half, wrapper and all, then to open one of the halves and eat it, followed by unwrapping the remaining half and eating that. The other group relaxed for a bit then ate the bar.
The camp that followed the two-step ritual rated their pleasure higher, and the chocolate more flavorful, than those who just ate their bars. They also said they would be willing to pay 25 cents more, on average, for the bar and took longer to savor it.
The second experiment, of 105 students, investigated whether any old movement had positive effects compared with another ritual devised by the researchers. This time lowly carrots, rather than chocolate, were used.
Before eating a carrot, some of the students always performed a standard ritual, which involved knocking twice before grabbing a bag of baby carrots, followed by another two knocks, taking a deep breath, and eating a carrot. Others performed that sequence only once, instead performing other gestures like turning their heads, snapping their fingers and clenching their fists.
To see if waiting would heighten anticipation for a four-calorie root crop, some students had to wait between carrot No. 2 and No. 3. Others didn’t. Incredibly, repeating the knocking-breathing ritual heightened subjects’ anticipation of a mini carrot.
The rituals concocted by researchers were silly-looking and deliberately irrelevant to the eating or drinking that followed, but nevertheless proved powerful. “Compared to just doing random gestures, doing nice systematic gestures brings them into a mindset that they are performing a ritual, and that led participants to enjoy carrots more than they would otherwise,” said Kathleen Vohs, the lead author of the paper and a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota.
Another experiment found that watching someone perform a ritual, say removing the wrapping on a wine bottle and uncorking it, does not heighten a spectator’s relish of their glass of zinfandel — only the pleasure of the bottle uncorker is enhanced. For the study, researchers had people mix lemonade and found that the act enhanced enjoyment for a drink mixer. But people who watched someone else prepare lemonade did not find the drink as flavorful.
A final experiment asked students how fun or interesting eating the chocolate was, confirmed that one reason food rituals enhance flavor and enjoyment is their ability to focus people’s interest on the ensuing consumption. The researchers called this focus “involvement.”
The study’s findings raise intriguing possibilities. Could rituals make often-maligned vegetables like broccoli worth savoring? Will my preschooler savor green beans if I start framing the border of his plate with them or if we sing a ditty in their honor before digging in?
“I love the concept that rituals increase the ability to savor food,” said Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic Family Health Center in Wooster, Ohio, who specializes in eating behavior, adding, “This study has great potential to help people create rituals and to savor food and choose healthier foods.”
Dr. Albers cited one of her clients, a woman who peeled an apple with a knife in a circular fashion — a technique she had learned from her mother as a child. “There’s a meditative way that she peels it, so by the end, she’s craving that apple,” she explained.
Dr. Albers, the author of “Eating Mindfully,” noted that rituals may also help in portion control, something the University of Minnesota researchers did not address in their experiments. She noted that in a small randomized controlled trial at the University of Texas in Austin, researchers found that teaching restaurant diners to focus on awareness of hunger and taste, along with other strategies, was effective at promoting weight management. “When you savor food you enjoy it more, and sometimes you eat less,” she said.
Certainly not all eating experiences will improve with a few knocks on a table and deep breaths. Rituals may augment flavor, but there’s a potential downside, the researchers caution. For some eaters, they wrote, “boosting the flavor of some tastes may be offputting.”
Here’s to hoping more green-beany beans won’t be one of them.
