Extrinsic and intrinsic food product attributes in consumer and sensory research: literature review and quantification of the findings

As recent years have seen a growing interest in integrating consumer and sensory science, this paper aims at presenting a systematic literature review of empirical studies investigating the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic food product attributes on consumers’ food decision making. Both an electronic search through a digital library database and a forward–backward search identified relevant international research. The final set of studies (n = 602) was coded in terms of research methods, intrinsic and/or extrinsic product attributes, consumer response measurement, study location, sample size, study origin, and food type. Although the importance of some product attributes such as taste, label, and price are very well recognized, other variables such as appearance, smell, sound, texture, and packaging have been neglected in research so far. Findings also show an imbalance of applied methods in consumer and sensory research. Surveys/questionnaires and acceptance tests are well-represented, whereas other methods or combinations thereof were rarely or never applied. Food liking was found to be the most frequent way to obtain consumer food evaluation data. Mirroring an increasing importance of product attributes in consumer food decisions, marketing managers and product developers today are well advised to take simultaneous effects of extrinsic and product attributes into account. This article calls for future studies with more holistic study designs to avoid the risk of misleading conclusions in both consumer and sensory research.