Enhancing and Consumer Expectations of Snack Foods to Promote Healthy Dietary Behaviour

The food industry is facing the strongest ever pressure to satisfy the consumer demand for healthier and more nutritious foods (e.g. low sugar/fat, high protein/fibre), and the most common way to achieve this is through reformulation of current recipes. There is also a growing consumer interest in protein-enriched foods. The addition or removal of ingredients, such as protein, from a food matrix is very challenging both from a process stand point but also from a palatability point of view, i.e. meeting consumer expectations. In such a context, not only does the interaction between ingredients and the food matrix play a key role in determining the consumer's sensory experience, but also the food exposure. The student will draw on techniques from experimental psychology to develop predictive models of food choice. They will conduct human studies to determine the effect of protein on acceptability over time. External stimuli such as label manipulations but also distortion to weight perception will be investigated to determine the extent to which these phenomena influence expected satisfaction.