Think you know quality?

What is quality? ??

Is it subjective or objective?

Is it relative / comparative or absolute / inherent?

Does it always need to be related to price? ??

I'm going to restrict my discussion of this topic to the area of my career experience and great passion: food!

Ask any 2 people to define quality and you'll never get the same answer twice!

In my household you'll often hear the phrase "buy cheap, pay twice" ??. I'm a firm believer that there is a relationship between quality and price and that underpayment can lead to buyer's remorse ??.

But also, if you ask 2 people to rate the quality of a product and only tell one of them how much it costs, you're again likely to get 2 different answers. The quality of the product hasn't changed but the person's perception of it has!

In the food industry you will often hear the term "quality standard" as in "it didn't meet the quality standard". And this is one way in which quality can be judged: against a pre-defined set of criteria or specification. This makes the assessment of quality much more objective: either the product met the quality standard or it didn't. If the quality standard says that the product has to be 3 centimetres in diameter and perfectly round then it either does or it doesn't, right?

Many people people may view this as a very dispassionate way of defining quality. This is the producer's way. However, if you view quality from the stand point of the consumer, then that is an enitrely different subject!

I'm thinking now of the "taste test". Infact this is very topical because I've spent quite a bit of time over the last month preparing comestibles (everything from a cheese and onion pasty to a jar of curd) for my local village show where they will be subjected to the scrutiny of a panel of judges, compared to their peers and rated.

This is almost a purely sensory exercise: yes, an entry might be downgraded if it doesn't conform to a few pre-set criteria such as the curd being in no larger than 1 pound jar with a twist-on lid but the grading will mainly be done by the use of the judge's senses - eyes, noses, toungues and taste buds (and possibly fingers!). ??????????

Ask a different panel of judges to appraise the same set of products and you'll likely get a different outcome. You might not get the same outcome if you asked the same panel of judges to re-evaluate the same set of products the next day! This just shows that there are a variety of very human characteristics that can influence the perception of quality: their personal preference (I like / I don't like), their experience and even just how many pints they drank the night before the assessment! In a group one person's judgement can also be affected by another's!

In this case the judgement is both comparative and largely subjective.

Judgement of quality can also be biaised by knowing certain facts. A good example is where people are asked to compare the quality of a branded product against an equivalent own label product. Many people have an inherent belief that the brand is of better quality (my wife included: for many years I couldn't shake her belief that Planters produce the best peanuts!) so, to remove any such bias, these type of evaluations should be conducted blind. ????

I have also heard the term "quality" applied to a deterioration in freshness e.g. the quality of that apple has deteriorated. This is another thing entirely, merely time and biochemical processes doing their thing! But, were you to eat a fresh apple and an old, stale apple, you'd probably agree that the "eating quality" of the 2 apples was very different. So, in the case of perishable products, there is very much a time-related dimension to quality.

During my 9 year stint as a retail technical manager I had many interesting conversations over product quality. I was asked questions such as:

• Is Belgian chocolate the best? ??
• Is Italian extra virgin olive oil the best? ??

So, does a product's geographical origin define its quality? In a great many cases I would say no, it's simply a case that, over a long period of time, marketeers have done such an effective job of promoting their country's products that eventually they have become synonymous with the highest quality.

So provenance doesn't necessarily confer higher quality on a food product although in some cases it does, because a particular country or region is acknowledged as being the producer of the highest quality product. A good example of this would be Madagascan vanilla.

Likewise people can become disproportionately focussed on one parameter as a barometer of product quality. I'm thinking cocoa solids in chocolate, the assumption being the higher the cocoa solids, the higher the quality. To reduce judgements of quality to a single dimension are generally ill-advised and chocolate is no exception. There is no straight-line relationship between cocoa solids and quality as there are many other factors that influence chocolate quality such as particle fineness and the length of the conching process (this is the maturation process step where flavour is developed) not to mention the recipe of the chocolate.

Quality can be ethereal and highly subjective: if you conducted a straw poll on your local high street of who produces the best chocolate I'm willing to bet that Cadbury's, Fererro Rocher, Hotel Chocolat, Marks & Spencer and many other brands would all get at least 1 vote! What does this show? Just that brand loyalty and personal preference have a large influence on the result!

One of the banes of my life as a retail technical manager was the media taste test. This was where a newspaper or magazine had conducted a review of a certain category of products and had rated all of those sampled. The scenario was always problematic if the product of the retailer for whom I was working hadn't received a ????? rating and a competitor's had! Invariably what I would find on further investigation was that the publication conducting the review hadn't compared like with like. For example they might have compared one retailer's instant packet soup with another's chilled soup! Possibly an extreme example but you get the point. ??

Aside from any meaningful assessment of quality needing to be between directly comparable products this also brings price into the equation. As I pointed out before, price influences people's perception of quality. Infact one could say that it is the barometer of quality since we are inherently willing to pay more for what we perceive to be of higher quality.

So, I'm not sure if I have been able to make compelling arguments to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this article? If nothing else though hopefully I have simply shown what a complex and nuanced subject the definition of quality is.