If you touch your food, it tastes better!

Marketers significantly invest on in-store sampling, especially in the food domain. And there is a good reason for that: it works. In-store tastings can increase sales by as much as 300%. Few promotions are as effective for generating consumer trials and purchases as offering free samples.

For some food items, free sampling can be handle with consumers helping themselves directly with their hands (eg. cakes, olives, baby carottes, etc). To do so, brands can use instruments (eg. toothpick) to allow consumers to pick the food, or ask consumers to use their hands to directly pick the food they want to taste. Does it have any difference? Does it change consumer’s evaluation of the product? If yes, what would be the best approach?

In a recent research, my colleagues Felipe Pantoja, Patricia Rossi, Amanda Yasmin and myself ask a group of people to use their hands when sampling food, while another group did not touch the food directly, to determine whether touching food would change food's evaluation and purchase intention. The results of multiple studies show that touching food improves its perceived flavor and increases intentions to purchase it. This effect goes away if the environnement is too sensory charged (too many solicitations for all the senses at the same time).

So, next time you will conduct a sampling for a food brand, or even serving your guests at home, try let them using their hands. They gonna love it ;)

To see all the results of this research and the methodology we used, you can download the full article in the link below.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0969698919303042

I would love to hear your thoughts about this research. Please, leave your comments below and share this article with your network.

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Adilson Borges is the Chief Learning Officer at Carrefour and the Immediate Past President of the Academy of Marketing Science. Adilson is also the IRC Professor of Marketing at Neoma BS. Before that, he held various positions and worked as a consultant for different organizations in Brazil, Europe and USA. He's is passionate about marketing, learning, decision making and behavioral science. Adilson enjoys sharing his personal thoughts here on LinkedIn. All statements and opinions presented in his articles or posts only reflect his personal opinion.

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