With "decoding meaty taste" to exciting meat alternatives

Module: Improve​
Keywords: Benchmarking, Drivers of Liking, Multi-method approaches

Vegan meat alternatives — one of our dearest playgrounds!

As part of a regular benchmark exercise across key markets, we had to deliver some bad news to one of the big plant-based pioneers: We need to work on your chicken chunks — there is room for improvement!

No sooner said than done. We wanted to work together to better understand what actually makes up the typical taste of meat and how we can recreate it in a vegan way — resulting in the "decoding meaty taste" project. To identify the drivers of liking and the ideal sensory profile, the best animal and plant-based products from several European countries were evaluated by consumers and objectively described by trained sensory panels. Based on the results, R&D developed new, improved prototypes. These were once again profiled by our panel of experts, and - MAGICALLY - our statistical model predicted which recipes would be most popular with consumers.

With these recipes and these recipes only, the final step was to validate them through an in-home use test. Lo and behold, the new chicken chunks are a complete success!

Want to learn more? Talk to ...

Viktoria Heinrich | Senior Sensory Manager
viktoria.heinrich@isi-insights.com