Relating consumer perceptions of pork quality to physical product characteristics

1. Consumers form expectations about the quality of meat at the point of purchase based on the quality cues that are available to them in the shop. These expectations can either be confirmed or disconfirmed during consumption, depending on how cap the consumers actually are of predicting the quality that they will perceived when preparing and consuming the meat. 2. The study uses the Total Food Quality Model as a frame of reference to investigate how consumers' quality expectations and quality experience with regard to pork are formed, how they are interrelated, and how both of them are related to a number of physical product characteristics commonly used to assess objective pork quality. 3. 200 German consumers are interviewed using real samples of pork chops, alongside with technical measurements of the meat quality. 4. Results show that consumers use colour, fat marbling, share of fat and quantity of meat juice as product-specific quality cues to derive expectations about the quality of pork. Consumers associate the quality of pork with health-related and hedonistic dimensions, and both quality expectations and quality experience are determined by the perceived taste, tenderness, wholesomeness, nutritional value, freshness, ju and leanness of the meat. 5. Results also reveal a moderate accordance between quality expectations and quality experience, meaning that the quality expectations consumers derive are not fully predictive of the quality that will be experienced upon consuming the meat. 6. Finally, it is clear that both quality expectations and quality experience are only weakly related to objective product characteristics. In some cases, an objective product characteristic may even have a positive impact on quality expectations and a negative impact on quality experience, or vice versa. 7. Since consumers obviously lack competence in judging the quality of meat when choosing among different kinds of meat in a purchase situation, marketers of pork are faced with a serious problem. One way of dealing with this problem, in cases where quality experience exceeds expectations, is to market the meat as part of a quality mark programme which outlines relevant sensory characteristics of the meat to the consumers.