What does it matter for consumers: sensory pleasure or health? A willingness to exchange approach

International audienceSensory pleasure and health concerns are two often conflicting dimensions of food choices. Consequently, it is important to develop methods to assess the relative importance of immediate sensory pleasure and future health benefits in consumers’ decisions. In the present experiment, the impact of sensory characteristics and nutritional labelling was examined for a snack product: chips. Three variants of chips were used: a regular recipe, a low salt version, and a low fat one. They were presented to 124 consumers in three different conditions: blind condition where consumers tasted the chips, product’s label (the expected liking was evaluated), and full information condition where participants tasted the chips while seeing the corresponding label. For each condition, they were asked to rank the three variants according to their preference from the most to the least preferred chips. Then, consumers’ willingness to exchange their preferred variant for a less preferred one but in larger quantities was evaluated permitting to calculate a relative willingness to pay (WTP) for each product and each participant. Consumers were segmented in three groups based on their preferred variant in the full information condition. Then, their relative WTP was calculated for each variant and each information condition. Results revealed that participants (28%) who gave a higher WTP to the regular version in the full condition also gave a higher WTP in the blind evaluation; however, they did not differentiate the three variants in the label condition. Participants who gave a higher WTP to one of the ‘healthier’ options in the full information condition also gave a higher WTP in the label condition for this variant, but they did not differentiate the three chips when evaluated in blind. Thus, it seems that consumers who gave a higher willingness to pay for a regular option were sensitive to the sensory differences induced by salt and fat reduction, whereas those who were indifferent to these sensory differences were more prone to value a variant with a nutritional advantage