Flavour and nutrition of fruits and vegetables create added value to consumers

Flavour and nutritional claims are a chance to create added value of fresh fruits and vegetables. The aim of this research was to define the most important product characteristics in purchasing tomato, sweet pepper and strawberry, according to consumers. Data were collected using an online questionnaire in the Netherlands. Research has been carried out for fruit or vegetable products tomato (n=584), strawberry (n=288) and sweet pepper (n=296). The characteristics, such as flavour, health, nutritional value and price were used in a choice-based conjoint analyses to test the importance of these characteristics to consumers in a forced choice between specific products. Results differ between tomato, strawberry and sweet pepper. For strawberry the relative importance of information about flavour was about the same as the importance of price, while for tomato and especially sweet pepper the importance of price was higher than flavour. For nutritional claims more specific, quantified claims, such as percentage of recommended daily intake (RDI) were preferred over more qualitative ‘source of’ claims, even when the ‘source of’ claims were combined with a health claim. Although products with nutritional claims were still preferred over products without any nutritional claim. The results revealed that adding product information about flavour and nutritional health claims do create added value to consumers. This finding is especially important when it comes to information about flavour in strawberry.