The taste, the aroma, the visual impression and the feel of food in your mouth food override almost everything. Trying to develop new foods that are not only more sustainable and healthy, but also tasty and economically successful, is often an uphill battle. For Gun Hagström, sensory science is key to reaching this goal.
Legumes are climate-smart, nutritious and cheap. But are the products made from them any good? They certainly don’t get top marks on the hedonistic scales that are used to measure how much people enjoy eating them.
“As consumers, we are so hard to please!” says Gun Hagström, business manager at the Department of Plant Breeding at SLU in Alnarp. She has recently reviewed the results of a consumer test involving 180 respondents, who have been trying tortillas made from legume flour.
“It wasn’t the case that they really disliked them,” she sums up.
The test forms part of the recently completed, Formas-funded project Tasty pea and bean food products: An integrated approach of plant breeding, raw material processing and food product development. Gun Hagström has led the interdisciplinary project, and SEK 6 million has been invested to supplement four different research and innovation projects with sensory analyses. This has been done to ensure that the initiatives being conducted along the entire value chain are not in vain simply because consumers do not like the end products.
“In my opinion, mixing with other products is the best way forward when it comes to legumes. This might involve having different proportions of legume flour in bread and pie crusts, for example, or mixing legumes with minced meat. In this way, you sneak them in through the back door and make the food healthier and more sustainable, without people even noticing!”
Proper sensory testing, such as that being carried out with the tortilla bread, is necessary to give new, more sustainable and healthy foods a chance in the market, considers Gun – even though each test costs hundreds of thousands of kronor.
“This is the only way to get reliable results about what consumers think. With this as a basis, you can then work on changes to recipes or make modifications to the raw materials. For example, legumes can be peeled. Some of the nutrients are lost, admittedly, but it is better to have some legumes than none at all.”
She is speaking from the experience she has gained over decades of working with ingredients in the food industry, both as an independent consultant and at companies such as Sockerbolaget, Lyckeby Stärkelse, the Danish trading house Procudan and Kiviks Musteri. She has visited most of the food industries across Scandinavia, and is constantly seeing opportunities for new applications.
“I have always been passionate about the potential of primary products. It’s possible to develop the desired properties through selective breeding rather than adding loads of additives or chemically modifying the ingredients!”
In addition to the sensory challenges, however, there are many other issues that need to be resolved when it comes to legumes. At present, there is neither the production capacity nor the demand for Swedish-produced legume flour, and so it is a chicken and egg situation. Legumes also contain antinutrients, which need to be managed in order that consumers don’t experience stomach pain.
“Eating habits and traditions are additional major obstacles, and it’s really interesting to think about how to get around them,” says Gun.
She set up a sensory laboratory at Sockerbolaget in Arlöv back in the late 1980s, but when she arrived at SLU ten years ago, they had no experience of sensory science. So Gun built up the SLU Food Lab in Alnarp, which serves as a resource for teaching, analysis and research projects relating to sensory science.
“It was only natural for me to take on the responsibility for panel training and sensory profiling in a project designed to find the tastiest cabbage, onion and carrot varieties. That’s just the way it is.”
Gun Hagström doesn’t have any ambitions of becoming an innovative entrepreneur in the food industry. She has had so much on her plate with her work, and for twenty years she also produced beef cattle, pigs and chickens on the farm where she grew up. But her work on sensory analyses is creating a knowledge bank for anyone who wants to use the research findings for new products.
“Industry is really keen to invest in new and sustainable food innovations, and academia could improve greatly when it comes to tailoring research to realistic projects that are in demand. At present, the academic world often calls companies and asks ‘Would you like to join us in a corner?’, simply because this is what is required when it comes to calls for applications for certain research projects. Other than this, academia and industry live on two different planets.”
As a result, she considers it her mission to bridge the gap between the two – and sensory analyses are a great tool for achieving this.
“Working together on multi-year projects that build mutual trust is very rewarding. For example, SLU Holding, which has a completely different understanding of business innovation than the academic world, has funded a sensory science project regarding potatoes. This has resulted in a new variety that is now in the process of being registered.”
Sensory analyses and consumer testing, showing which products have the potential to succeed, are contributing to sustainability in all its forms, as well as to Sweden’s preparedness and ability to be self-sufficient, considers Gun Hagström. They are important tools for the health of both people and the planet.
“And I am absolutely convinced that, with more focus on sensory science, it will be possible to encourage us to want to eat more sustainably and healthily. But it takes time!”
SLU – Subject area Plant Product Quality Improvement
Gun Hagström. Photo: Mårten Svensson
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