The fortification of maize bread with legume flour was explored in order to increase the protein content of the traditional Portuguese bread ‘broa’, comprised of more than 50% maize flour. The optimization of legume incorporation (pea, chickpea, faba bean, lentil), considering the influence of different maize flours (traditional-white, traditional-yellow, hybrid-white, hybrid-yellow), on consumer liking and sensory profiling of ‘broa’ was studied. A panel of 60 naïve tasters evaluated twenty different breads, divided in four sets for each legume flour fortification, each set including four breads with varying maize flour and a control (no legume). Tasters evaluated overall liking and the sensory profile through a check-all-that-apply ballot. Crude protein and water content were also analyzed. There were no significant differences in overall liking between the different types of legumes and maize. The incorporation of chickpea flour yields a sensory profile that most closely resembles the control. The protein content increased, on average, 21% in ‘broa’, with legume flours having the highest value obtained with faba bean incorporation (29% increase). Thus, incorporation of legume flours appears to be an interesting strategy to increase bread protein content, with no significant impact on consumer liking and the ‘broa’ bread sensory profile.
Nowadays, consumers become more aware of pesticide risk problems and changes are recorded in consumer behaviour because of food safety or environmental ("sustainability") considerations, or both. The individual consumer faces a trade-off between the utility derived from tastes and characteristics of a product, the utility of behaving "green" and the utility of healthy dieting. In this work, we used experimental markets to measure the consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for apples and apple juice produced with reduced pesticide use. In order to see the impact of different information about pesticides use, different apple types were used which are products with different levels of pesticides: Regular apples, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) apples, Organic apples. To know if the potential diversity in consumer behaviour was depending on geographical location, experimental participants were randomly recruited from the general population in Portugal and France. The protocol's experimental design was applied in these two countries, to 207 consumers of apples and apple juice. The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auction mechanism was used and different apples were sold under different information conditions in a random-price sale.We show that there is a consumer WTP for pesticides use reduction (a premium for product with specific signal) and that specific information on pesticide use increases this WTP for organic product but not for IPM products. However, the most important result is that the specific information decreases the WTP for the regular product. Then it seems more rigorous to treat the results in terms of "premium against the regular product", anticipating the loss of market share for the regular product. After showing that consumers' premium for pesticide reduction is not independent from the product's sensory attributes, we give the quantitative results for the consumers WTP for a pesticide reduction.
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