Psychology behind the choice of spices and seasonings
How does our mind drive our choice of spices, seasonings and sauces when we buy as well as when we add them to the food we are preparing so that they complement the prepared food. It comes from three major sources of information to your mind— flavour (taste), appearance of food (visual) and experience replay of previous interactions with same or similar food (memory).
The real experience about the taste depends on how the delivery of food looks like whichever way it comes — served at home, served at restaurant, ordered from restaurant or packaged and available in market.
Tomato ketchup, for example is designed as a sauce that lets the consumer touch all basic tastes of salt, sweet, sour and umami (savour). Note that it only lets the consumer “touch” these tastes therefore the consumer knows it can accompany many foods singly. Existence of so many spices indicate there are many different taste-worlds. Few consumers have more sweet tooth than others. Few consumers’ mind responds to variety or intensity of tastes of underlying food more than other. Ultimately, back in the mind, the consumer knows what spices and seasonings are required to personalize the taste of their food. As the food gets customized and makes consumer’s taste buds happy, consumers have a natural preference for spices and seasonings.
Taste and flavour, but also the color, looks, smell, touch-feel and sound while using them, are experienced and accepted or rejected by the consumer. And so is the packaging of these spices and herbs while being sold in market. If you conduct an experiment where people are allowed to experience only taste and flavor and consumer is kept blind from all other experiences, i.e. sound, smell, color, looks and touch-feel, a well packaged spice will mostly not make any happy impression to the consumer, and so is non-packaged spice.
In the time ahead, fine restaurants will start adapting practice of removing typical spices and additives like salt, black pepper, ketchups from their tables and tables will be designed in a way to accommodate more spices, herbs, seasonings and sauces so that people can customize their foods their own way.
The same will go true for businesses which prepare food at home, restaurant or factory and deliver to people. They have to identify customization preference of each customer according to their taste psychology and add such spices or deliver a host of spices in small sachets for being more empathetic to the customer and build a lasting relationship with customer.
If you are running a food business and distracted about your customers’ psychology about food, let us work it out together. You bring your understanding about your customers, their preferences and talk to an expert psychologist on www.orendacure.com who can help you use your information in a structured way so that you get out of distraction and make directed movement towards selecting spices.
