Consumers Relate Perception of “Natural” Foods

A study by researchers in Australia and France sought to understand what consumers perceive by the term natural. The aim was to test eight hypotheses on food ingredients and processes used for manufactured food.

Fifty food criteria were rated for naturalness by 190 consumers, aged 18–65, in the research by CSIRO of Adelaide, Australia, and AgroParisTech of Paris, France.

Although there was some variation by gender and education level, the overall results show that the consumers believe:

• chemical changes are more potent than physical changes.
  there is a minimal effect of mixing like entities.
• the more processing the greater the effect on consumer's deviation away from natural.
• contagion accounts for naturalness reduction but is independent of dose above a certain level.
• E-numbers are perceived to be less natural than the same preservatives described by chemical and common names.

The researchers had also hypothesized that consumers perceive addition to have a greater effect than removal, however this was only partially validated. And hypotheses of the perceptions that process have more effect than content, and novel ingredients have a greater effect than ‘known’ ingredients were not supported by the study results.

The suggested implications for new manufactured food products are that products with physical changes, less processing, with like ingredients that are described using common named descriptors for ingredients would be perceived to be more natural.

The full study is available at NCBI.