Science Spark : reducing salt content playing with expectation

Salt reduction is a big challenge that all food producer are facing. Removing or reducing salt from a product is indeed easy, but making the consumers still liking it is another story...

 

Unilever regularly reveals scientific work on the topic, and  in the last one, they " investigated if the expectation, or implicit assumption, that saltiness remains constant across mouthfuls, can indeed reduce the perception of variation in salt concentration." In other words : "if a product looks the same, smells the same and has the same texture as the product one is used to eat, small variations in taste will go unnoticed".

 

And they indeed show it !  If you eat a  product with a reduced salt content, you ll notice it immediatly. But, if the first bite of the product has the salt content you are used to, and the next ones a reduced salt content, but all other sensory attributes (ie smell, texture, taste) remaining the same, you won't notice it.

 

Of course, the next question is how to implement this result in a product...

Increasing saltiness perception through perceptual constancy created by expectation, Dijksterhuis et al, Food Quality and Preferences, Volume 34, June 2014, Pages 24–28