Presents the various aspects of food quality from the consumers' viewpoint.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Ferree, Marie

English

Research Papers in Economics

WHAT IS FOOD QUALITY?
by
Marie Ferree
University of California
Berkeley, California
Presents the various aspects of
food quality from the consumers’
viewpoint.
What is food quality? It’s a nice tidy
Iittlequestion withas many answers as there
are people to give them, To come up with a
workable answer, Isearched through the files,
discussed the question of quality with some
consumers and I even gave the subject some
thought. And I found an answer in the form
of a question. What is food quality?
Quality of what, and according to whom?
Definitions of quality include the
precise: “Thedistinctivet rait, character-
istic, capacity or virtue of a product that
sets it apart from all others.” “Quality”,
according to the 1970 Yearbook of Agricul-
ture, “is the measure or expression of good-
ness.” When I asked one homemaker what
quality meant to her she said, “Ask my
neighbor she really knows quality food.” A
definition of quality I picked up while
attending an industry meeting is “Quality is
what you think the competition thinks the
standard is.” Put still another way quality
turns out to be the standard the consumer
will accept.
There is little need to emphasize the
point that family and institutional food
buyers have a somewhat different set of
quality standards from that of other buyers
within the food production and distribution
system.
Concerns of people involved in food
production, processing and distribution in-
clude selection and use of plants and ani-
mals which will produce characteristics of
performance excellence related toharvesting,
shipping, processing, and shelf life, Char-
acteristics of performance excellence do, of
February 73/page 34
course, include factors of food safety and
nutritive valued I say “of course there is
concern for food safety and nutritive value”
although, there seems to be considerable
difficulty proving concern for either when
confronted by consumer advocates.
Food buyers are concerned about some
of these same characteristics of excellence.
They express them differently, Lacking the
objective measuring devices of other segments
of the production, processing and distribu-
tion system, consumers rely on judgments of
color, feel texture, odor, sound and the
written word. When the opportunity presents
itself, the food buyer may also take advan-
tage of the judgment of taste.
We have been told, at times in rather
strident tones, that consumers’ chief con-
cerns relate to food safety and nutritive
value:
-- That consumers fear nutritive
value is lost in processing
and no attempt is made to re-
store it.
.- That nutrients and other food
ingredients are added to foods
far beyond safe limits.
-- That pesticide, herbicide, and
recently, that some hormone
residues are present in the
food Supply.
I did a count of questions that come
into our Public Service Department and dis-
covered that of 500 questions over the past
10 months, 400 of them were directly con-
cerned with food. Presumably, these 400
questions should give some clues to what
concerns consu-mers. Bear in mind, please,
this Public Service Department is located
at the University of California, Berkeley,
where all sorts of craziness, food craziness
included, is reputed to have its roots.
Journal of Food Distribution ResearchA little more than half the questions
asked, 56%, were direct requests for how-
to-do-it. “HOW can I pickle olives?” was
the question asked most often.
Other questions included: “what can I
do with a tree full of lemons?” “Can I
freeze coconut?” “Could you sendme a recipe
for baking a whole sa.lmon?’r
About 33%of the questions were directly
concerned with nutrition: ‘Where can I get
a list of the nutritive value of different
foods?rr ‘rArevitamins in pills the same as
rrwhatcheeses are low vitamins in food?rr
in fat?rr ‘rHow many calories in Ricotta
cheese and in cottage cheese?’r
About 5% of the questions concernqd
food safety: ‘rMygrandmother dies recently
and left a large number of cans of home
canned pickles, fruits and vegetables. . .
are they safe to eat?” “Are juniper berries
safe to eat?” “How can you tell if tuna is
contaminated with botulism?” “My freezer
was off for two days. . can I refreeze the
vegetables and pork chops?’r
About 3% of the questions concerned
meat grades and labeling: “Is a meat market
allowed to package round steak cut in small
pieces, label it ‘stroganoff beef’ and sell
it for a higher price than the piece of
round steak in one piece?r’ ‘rWhatis the
best grade of beef?” “How much fat is in
regular ground beef in the supermarket?”
It was difficult to classify 3% of the
questions: “What is a kiwi?’r “Where can I
buy eels?” and “Are guinea pigs edible?”
I’m still not sure about the guinea
pig question. Was it a problem of safety?
Nutrition? Preparation? Maybe the quinea
pig had become a storage problem.
Food buyers have specific performance
expectations for food: they expect meat to
be tender when cooked; they expect salad
greens tobe crisp; they expect the packaged
flour mix to turn out a product that is ac-
ceptable to the family or clientele; they
expect canned peaches to live up to the
descriptive label; they expect frozen dinners
to satisfy the appetite.
Food buyers put a high priority on eye
appeal of fresh foods in the market. Well
colored fruits and vegetables, uniform sizes
and products that are free of any kind of
damage will get agood rating from most food
buyers . Yet they know intuitively or by
whatever sixth sense food buyers use, that
color isn’t the reliable guide to quality.
If you don’t~elieve it you have never
watched food buyers perform their food buy-
ing chores.
Because color and uniformsize get con-
siderable emphasis from other segments of
the marketing system, consumers perhaps give
these two factors a little too much emphasis
but that is the way it is. Exterior color
often has little to do with what’s inside
and uniform sizes do not indicate how good
or bad a food is. But what other factors
can the food buyer judge?
At the meat counter, the food buyer
relies on the reputation of the food store
or on grades, or brand names as guides to
quality. When you dig into food shoppers’
judgments of meat quality factors, you get
a mixed bag and they may or may not match
government and industry’s judgment.
We are all familiar with the studies
done of consumer preferences for beef, in
which the preference turns out to result
from the halo effect of the word “Choice,”
rather than any accurate judgment of quality
on the part of the food shopper.
Palatability, the way food tastes,
ranks high on the family and institutional
foodbuyer’s list of quality standards. Yet,
this is one quality factor the buyer can
rarely judge until after the sales transac-
tion. Indeed, there are maturity standards
for practically everything that grows--live-
stock, poultry, cereal, fruits and vegetables.
The standards relate, or are supposed to, to
palatability, And there are palatability
standards for processed foods. But the
standards lose something in the translation.
Immature fruits and vegetables still appear
in the market; overmature peas, beans and
cornare still processed; the word r’seasoningr’
on the package labels of processed foods
(especially mixtures) translates “too much
salt”.
Journal of Food Distribution Research February 73/page 35So what is quality? Quality of food
includes all those characteristics of ex-
cellence that make it acceptable to the food
buyer. The fact that food quality turns out
to be the standard consumers will accept
doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The major-
ity of consumers find acceptable product
quality in the market, They must, estimates
vary, but it appears that shoppers in food
markets make choices at the rate of about
4 per second. Shoppers do take sanitation
and safety of food pretty much for granted.
Another measure of how well quality
standards meet consumers’ expectations is
that it has taken 20 years to get a real
consumer movement under way. And we aren’t
hearing the majority of consumers, we hear
the crusaders, those who will save us in
spite of ourselves. What they advocate is
good. But the results of the crusade were
obvious a long time ago. And the decisions
that have brought nutrition labeling, in-
gredient labeling and price per measure
should have been made without the high pres-
sure and invective that finally precipitated
them. And if you think all this additional
information is the end to making better food
shoppers-- you are wrong. We may be better
educated, more sophisticated and have access
to a better commodity system.
It will be well worthwhile, starting
now, to listen more closely to the real
consumers . Hear them when they say they
want fresh strawberries that taste like
fresh strawberries, fresh tomatoes that
taste like fresh tomatoes, and ripe peaches,
plums and melons.
If you insist that little can be done
in guaranteeing good flavor characteristics
of fresh foods my only reaction is why not?
?:>’C >k>’;>’;;;
February 73/page 36 Journal of Food Distribution Research

WHAT IS FOOD QUALITY?

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