Call for partners | FlavourFeel: Food & Emotion enhancement through Flavour
Consumers increasingly seek comfort or energy boost or more focus through food and specific flavours. For example, warm and sweet flavours are usually linked to comfort and relaxation moments. Moreover, consumers increasingly shift from a 3-meal diet to consumption of snacks throughout the day. And interestingly, the snack food market is projected to grow significantly in the coming 3-4 years. This creates a huge opportunity to design foods by flavour that intentionally support the consumers’ emotional needs.
Partner up for impact
We are seeking industrial partners across the food and beverage value chain who are interested in optimising their products with a focus on flavour and consumer engagement. This includes flavour houses, ingredient producers, and technology providers aiming to advance their tools or software relevant to measuring implicit consumer responses.
About the project
- This project will be submitted to the Dutch Topsector AgriFood subsidy, which covers 50% of the total project budget. The remaining 50% will be provided by industry partners through a mix of in‑cash and in‑kind contributions.
- The total project budget is expected to be approximately €2 million, with partner contributions averaging €20,000–50,000 per year. The project duration will be 3-4 years.
About the project
Although flavour is the key decision factor for consumers, relevant published studies or databases often focus only on specific taste perceptions like sweetness or bitterness, neglecting smell and aroma which is the most relevant factor impacting flavor perception. Additionally, published data are often based on limited number of participants or model products like flavoured watery solutions. And most importantly they often use only one-dimensional approach to measure the emotional response during consumption. Within FlavourFeel, we aim to use our strong expertise in consumer behavioural responses and in flavour analytics towards bridging the gap between analysis and sensory perception, and moreover we aim to combine the potential of both explicit and implicit measurements for emotional responses. By leveraging these expertise, FlavourFeel aims to understand how food and specific flavours influence consumer emotions, to identify how targeted flavours can be used to support and enhance emotional states of consumers, and to build a sciencebased foundation linking flavour attributes to emotional responses possibly across the consumption journey, enabling industry to design emotionally meaningful, flavourdriven products.
Together with the partners of the consortium we aim to refine and shape the exact scope of FlavourFeel to for example a targeted consumers group or a specific category of food products or beverages. The intended deliverables of the FlavourFeel project will be:
- An optimized protocol for measuring multimodal emotional responses during food consumption.
- Flavour-Emotion map showing which flavours trigger which emotional responses in specific consumer situation
- Practical Flavour-based database for R&D and product development purposes for applications with enhanced emotional wellbeing
- A report/assessment proof-of-principle of a prototype product or flavour concept (e.g. mood-enhancing beverage, or a snack towards a specific positive mood direction)
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