SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

Roger Harker1, Sara R. Jaeger2, Christina Roigard1, Sok L. Chheang1, David Jin1, Virginia Corrigan1, John van Klink1, Aaron McCallion3, Wally Tangohau4

Consumer perceptions and attitudes to New Zealand’s honeys have been captured in a recent study led by the Te Pūmautanga o Te Arawa Charitable Trust.

More than 3000 honey consumers from New Zealand, the USA and the UK participated in the study. The texture and flavour of New Zealand honeys was assessed using consumers from Auckland. The study also explored how consumers in the USA and UK balance written information about sensory properties against about health properties and environmental and cultural provenance.

How do you take your honey?

Honey can be overwhelmingly sweet when tasted as a raw product, and this limits the number of samples that can be tasted one after the other. It was important to understand how many samples researchers could present to consumers and the best format to present them in (i.e., raw honey, honey on toast, honey dissolved in water).

Consumers living in Auckland indicated they mainly ate honey on toast/bread (71%), in a hot drink (58%), in cooking/baking (46%), as a sugar substitute (39%), and 25% indicated they ate it on its own.

Raw honey compared with honey on toast or dissolved in water

A group of 122 Auckland-based consumers were presented with six samples: individual samples of rewarewa and clover honey (as a lower-flavoured sweet honey control) with both presented raw on a spoon, spread on a mini-toast, and dissolved in water. They were asked how much they liked the samples and what flavours were perceived according to a checklist.

The results indicated that when considering the flavour of honey, it is as important to consider what it is being eaten with. There are consumption situations involving honey where the nuanced flavour may be less important than its ability to add sweetness to a food and/or meal.

It is hardly surprising that the flavour of honey is modified by the products it is eaten with. Honey dissolved in water (a proxy for a sweetened beverage) was least liked and consumers, on average, couldn’t differentiate between rewarewa and clover honey dissolved in water based on flavour.

Clover honey was slightly more liked than the rewarewa honey when eaten raw or on toast and this was associated with a cleaner flavour that was lower in full-bodied, caramel and butterscotch descriptors.

For each honey, the flavour profiles changed when eaten raw or spread on toast—to the extent that rewarewa on toast was described in a similar way to raw clover.

Honey on toast. Photo supplied.

 

Flavour differences among non-mānuka monofloral honeys

Assessing honey can be fatiguing; consequently, researchers used an exploratory approach where the same group of about 36 Auckland-based consumers tasted just one honey each day. Again, they were asked about liking and described the flavour using a checklist.

Twelve honeys were assessed including rewarewa, rātā, pōhutukawa, kāmahi, and clover, including some that were presented in creamed and runny formats.

When assessed in this way, the honeys were mostly liked with scores around 7—‘like moderately’—which is a respectable score in this type of consumer sensory research. Only one sample, a rewarewa honey, was ‘liked slightly’, which was significantly less than for seven of the better-liked honeys (including other samples of rewarewa, rātā, pōhutukawa, kāmahi, and clover).

Assessment of the sensory properties demonstrated that consumers provided different descriptions for many samples. However, there was no discernible pattern according to monofloral style—in other words, each honey sample was distinct, but the groupings overlapped.

The only identifiable trend was that the creamed honeys were perceived as more buttery and more full-bodied than the runny versions (only tested for rātā and pōhutukawa). Better separation of monofloral styles by consumers might be achieved by recruiting larger numbers of consumers (providing more statistical power to the comparisons) and assessing a greater number of honey samples (to provide a better overall representation of the monofloral styles).

Importance of the honey story—mānuka

The studies described above represent a focus on honey flavour. There was also an interest in understanding how overseas consumers perceived the importance of honey flavour relative to other attributes such as health properties and provenance. For this aspect of research, it was important to use a New Zealand honey that was familiar to overseas consumers—mānuka honey was selected on this basis.

This online study involved 1573 consumers from the USA and 1567 consumers from the UK. Participants were provided with information about the honey that included:

  • sensory properties,
  • health properties, and
  • environmental and cultural provenance.

For these informational texts, consumers performed a text-highlighting task where they highlighted in green the words and phrases that were liked, and in red the words and phrases that were disliked (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Example of text-highlighting task completed by one consumer.

In general, consumers’ attitudes to New Zealand honey were dominantly positive and they were excited by the descriptions.

For sensory characteristics, consumers responded most positively to the sentence:

‘Generally speaking, mānuka honey has an intense flavour, distinctive aroma, creamy texture, and a rich colour.’

For health properties, consumers responded most positively to the sentence:

‘Mānuka honey, however, is somewhat special in that antibacterial activity is due to a nectar-derived compound.’

For provenance, the consumers responded most positively to the sentence:

‘The mānuka tree grows in New Zealand’s forests, which support many endangered birds and insects.’

Having engaged with the information provided in the text-highlighting task, consumers were asked how important the different types of information were in their purchase decision—consumers allocated points (100 in total) to each information type.

Across the study, more than half the points were allocated to the health properties with the remainder equally split between sensory properties and cultural provenance.

Implications for marketing monofloral honeys

The definition of food quality is ‘all those characteristics of a food (not just the sensory characteristics) that lead a consumer to be satisfied with the product.’

For honey, the wellness halo associated with it being a natural product and knowledge of its health properties are key components. These are attributes that consumers believe are true but cannot test for themselves in the same way as taste. It is likely that there are many additional factors that can reinforce and add to the credence of New Zealand honey.

The role of sensory properties of honey in consumer food-choice has barely been unravelled and there is much to do—the results here should be considered as a start to the questions rather than a definitive answer. Detailed knowledge is missing regarding how New Zealand honey fits into people’s food-related lives and what consumption opportunities exist.

The role of distinctive flavours as tangible markers of the provenance of honey shouldn’t be underestimated. The industry should consider how the flavours of New Zealand honeys sit alongside other international honeys, as well as the different flavours available from monofloral honeys within New Zealand.

There is an ongoing need to educate and market to consumers in a way that establishes flavour expectations. The ongoing success of the honey industry is dependent on understanding the wants and needs of honey consumers. Targeted innovation will lead to success.

For more information on this research, please contact Nico Bordes: Nico.Bordes@plantandfood.co.nz

1The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, 2Aarhus University, Denmark, 3Waka Digital, 4Te Pūmautanga o Te Arawa Charitable Trust

This research was funded by New Zealand’s National Science Challenge High-Value Nutrition – Ko Ngā Kai Whai Painga.

We thank other members of the project research team: Derrylea Hardy (Massey University), Dulantha Ulluwishewa and Karl Fraser (AgResearch), Alistair Mowat (Thought Strategy); and the project advisory panel, Logan Bowyer, Brenda Tahi, Phil Edmonds and Megan Sargent for their advice and support, and individual beekeepers and apiaries for providing honey samples. This research would not have been possible without industry involvement.

Assessing sensory perceptions

Flavour includes components of:

  • taste: the perception of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami tastants in the mouth
  • smell: the aromatic compounds that are sensed when they make their way through posterior nares from the mouth into the nose; e.g., caramel and fruity, and
  • physio-chemical feeling factors: compounds producing heating and cooling effects.

Alongside flavour are the texture characteristics, including:

  • the perception of mechanical properties (e.g., hard and soft)
  • mouthfeel (e.g., smooth and gritty)
  • other factors such as fat content and moisture content).

The sensory properties, both flavour and texture, are traditionally used by the food industry to characterise and evaluate products.

Assessments can variously use people who are part of either an industry-expert panel, a trained sensory panel, or a consumer panel. These panels differ in benefits and costs, and often provide comparable results in terms of ability to discriminate between products.

Beyond this, it is known that consumer hedonic (pleasurable) responses can be positively and negatively influenced by extrinsic information (brand, marketing information, and packaging).