Liesbeth Zandstra - Making Healthy Habits Irresistible

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Liesbeth Zandstra is Science Leader Consumer Science at Unilever Foods Innovation Centre Wageningen and professor of Food Reward and Behaviour at Wageningen University and Research (The Netherlands). Her main research focuses on scientific challenges to find new ways to make the healthy and sustainable choice the easy and preferred choice. She is particularly interested in the psychophysiological and behavioral effects of foods as well as new methodologies for better understanding sensory perception and consumer behaviour.

The consumer voice is at the heart of all the work she does. Her focus is on technology and product innovations in relation to consumer behaviour that contribute to a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle and increase overall well-being. Examples include the acceptance of salt-reduced products in South Africa and plant-based meat products in Europe and making plant-based cooking accessible and cookable in the Netherlands.

Liesbeth gained extensive experience in establishing and leading teams: skill-base, projects, community of practice, and other teams. She also managed complex international projects across different international Unilever locations. She has a strong national and international network and as part of the Ecosystem Innovation paradigm she has collaborated with leading universities and research institutes all over the world - including for example the UK, South Korea, India, and South Africa. She is chairing the foundation ‘Feed Your Mind’ that works on a sustainable food transition by combining breakthrough research with innovative food design for all.

Her passion is to develop new insights and innovations and drive these to have a real impact on the health and well-being of citizens worldwide.

Liesbeth Zandstra on LinkedIn

Transcript (Semi-automated, forgive typos!)

Danielle: Liesbeth, welcome to the show.

Liesbeth: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Danielle: Okay, well, let's start, because as a start, we'd love for our listeners to get to know you better. So can you share a little bit about your journey in sensory and consumer science and what led you to focus on this fascinating field?

Liesbeth: Shall I first start to tell a bit more about my background and my career? I studied Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University, and afterward, I also did my PhD at Wageningen. I studied condition flavor preferences, and also the regulation of food intake in relation to appetite control. Then directly after my PhD, I started to work at Unilever in R&D, and that is now almost 24 years ago. I always stayed in research, always in consumer science, in sensory science, focusing on the repeat consumption of products, and always then in relation to health and sustainability. Then about six years ago, I became a professor at Wageningen University on Food Rewards and Behavior. It means that one day a week, I work at the university, and four days a week, I'm at Unilever.

Danielle: What inspired you to choose this career in sensory and consumer research?

Liesbeth: I thought about it, and actually, I gradually grew into it, I think. The first time I was in contact with sensory science, that was during my studies. There was this course, sensory science, and I really loved it because what we did there in small groups, we had to do the hypothesis, the data collection, the analysis, and reporting. I really liked that. Actually, that's 30 years ago. Now, if you're at a university, you have a fully specialized program with basic sensory science, advanced sensory methods, sensometrics, and psychobiology. Now, it's completely different. But at that time, it was this one course. Of course, I developed my further than during the work I did. But also, I've always been interested in people. Why do they do what they do? And if you talk about food, why do they eat what they eat? So then that combination, that is actually what I always do now in my work. So that is how it came.

Danielle: Yeah, that's the focus of your research. So you have these two big roles, professor in Wageningen and also science leader in Unilever. How do you balance that? Because it's also a different type of role.

Liesbeth: Yeah, it is. It's unique, I would say. It's not so common to do so, but I see it as a true win-win. What I do at the university is investigate more the fundamental science in sensory science, in consumer science, and what I can do then can bring those insights to Unilever or the business and implement that in Unilever products or within the Unilever context and vice versa. At Unilever, from the business, we get all kinds of questions. Often, those questions have fundamental scientific questions underlying it. Those questions, I can bring them to the university and explore them further. It's really a nice combination. At least that's how I see it. Yeah.

Danielle: In the industry, you identify what are the gaps in a way, then what are the things we don't know, and then you have a good solid way of studying that.

Liesbeth: Exactly.

Danielle: Not the fastest way, output-focused, but...

Liesbeth: Yeah. I also notice, people find those questions also very inspirational, or it needs all your creativity and critical thinking to address them. So it's also from a scientific point of view, it's really, I think, exciting.

Danielle: And do you have any examples of the impacts of what you have been doing? How do you combine your academic research with these industrial applications?

Liesbeth: Yeah, so there's lots of examples, but maybe I want to take one step back because at Unilever, we always say, if we think we can do it alone, we are not thinking big enough. If you think about as a society, we face all the challenges, the food system that's broken, climate change, protein transition, those challenges, of course, we need to act on it. We need We need solutions. We need innovations. You can only do that when you work together. The idea there is collaboration, of course, with universities, leading experts in the field or research institutes, and that's, I think, overarching how in the end, you come to big implications or impacts. For example, I was wondering, because there are so many, maybe the one on salt reduction is a nice one because it started small, and that's maybe, it was about 10 years ago, we were really into going to the whole product portfolio, and where possible, we were taking out salt to make healthy alternatives of products. You can think about soups or sauces, those kinds of things. We had one study in the lab, and that was with soup, and that was reducing salt. We were playing around about... Because you notice it a bit, you try to make it really nice, pleasant taste, but you need to communicate about it because consumers will notice it. We were playing around with different types of communication. What we learned is that the moment you start to communicate about salt reduction, consumers expect it to be less tasty or it is less... It's something weird, maybe not so nice, not appealing. In that study, we also found we had a salt shaker next to it that people were actually adding salt back to the soup. It was so much salt that it was more than we originally took out. They added more salt back to the soup. This is really counteractive behavior that we really didn't want to have. That was actually a start and opened up a whole research line because then we were wondering, "What happens when people do that at home or what happens in a restaurant? What happens during the cooking process?" We work together with different universities in the world to generate new insights in the area of salt perception and salt usage behavior around those types of products. We published in scientific journals to share these insights with our scientific peers. But what I find always important is to have actually impact afterwards. We also shared it in summits and workshops together with governments and health experts or health authorities to discuss, what do we do with this? Can we come up with solutions? The key message was there. Okay, we need to reformulate the products, but also focus on consumer-focused behavior change. Really make sure that you don't get these counteractive behaviors. That ended up also on educational programs in South Africa, in Brazil, in Indonesia. It's quite big. In the end, I think we have now great tasting products. Also, consumers are more aware of what salt is doing with you and that you need to pay attention to it. In the end, because you have such a global outreach, you have an impact on the health and well-being of really a lot of people. There's some significant impact there. That's just one example I thought may be nice to share.

Danielle: Yeah, great example.

Liesbeth: I can do others, but I come later maybe to the other ones.

Danielle: Yeah, let's go to another question. It touches upon, of course, what you have been saying, but one of your missions is to help consumers make healthier choices, as you just mentioned. Less salt or sugar or eating more vegetables. What are some of the key strategies that you use to promote healthier eating habits amongst consumers?

Liesbeth: Yeah, indeed. My research focuses on how can we make the healthy and sustainable choices preferred. That is at the interface of sensory perception. It's about food rewards, about repeated food choice behavior. In the end, I want to come to strategy to develop and create actually healthy and sustainable products. It's really focusing on the products itself, but also interventions, consumer behavior change interventions that facilitate the transition towards healthier and more sustainable consumption patterns. It goes beyond the product itself. You have the product, you have the consumer, the person who's eating the product, and the context, when you eat it, how you eat it, with who you eat it, and what are triggers, barriers, elements around it that either can help this transition, or if it's a block or a barrier, can we get it away? Those things, that are the strategies I work on. Maybe one example is on the protein transition.

Danielle: The plant-based.

Liesbeth: Yeah, it's really about the plant-based. The idea is that, of course, we know that animal meat, that's a high consumption of animal meat that's not good for the environment, it's not good for your health, and also not for animal welfare. So what can we do there to help people to eat less animal meat? So that could be eat it less frequently, eat smaller portions, or eat plant-based meat. That's one example. So we have the brand, the Vegetarian Butcher, with all a variety of plant-based meat products. Then we focus, of course, in the product development. Can we make this plant-based meat, the meat substitute? Can we make it in such a way that it really mimics animal meat in taste, texture, the juiciness, firm bite, those kinds of things? Can we make it even better? That's more. But not only that. I focus also on once you eat it, you swallow it, you get all the physiological processes there. What happens? Is that similar? Is it equally satisfying or not? We focused, for example, on acceptance of plant-based meat, that you not only initially like it, but that you continue to like it over repeated consumption. We checked that, and indeed, plant-based meat is also sustainably liked over repeated consumption, so tick in the box. But also we learned from consumers that they expect plant-based meat or a meal with plant-based meat to be less filling, less satisfying than a meal with animal meat. A consumer says, If I eat a vegetarian hamburger, I always eat two. Yeah, that's not good, of course. So then we thought, let's check it. Yeah, so is that really true or not? And maybe that was in the past because then the quality of plant-based meat was not that good yet. There's lots of developments in it. We have really good quality products at the moment, also from a nutritional point of view. So we just check that, right? We ask people to eat meals with plant-based meat, meals with animal meat. We measured subjective feelings of hunger and satiety just before, right after, and different moments afterwards, whether they compensated or not. Also there we found there's no difference. People feel equally full after eating a meal with plant-based meat versus a meal with animal meat, which is also good, right? So all those things we use in these insights in our developments and really try to support consumers as much as possible to actually start eating it and enjoying it. It's all about, get a good superior experience. That is one thing, but the other thing, if you take it even a step further, if you don't do plant-based meat, but plant-forward diet. So you have a meal without meat and maybe with more veggies, vegetables, or more legumes like chickpeas or beans or lentils. How can you help people that can actually cook that, give them inspiration with recipes, but also products with that that really makes a dish without animal meat really great and satisfactory. Knor, for example, we have lots of cooking aids. We really try to get most of the flavor of vegetables because it's really great taste, right? And then help consumers who have less cooking skills. So that's also a challenge. Make it easy, accessible, and then the people are confident that they can actually do that. So that's just one. The different things you can do with the protein transition, different strategies to help people to actually go and do that.

Danielle: Because they have, of course, for years, the whole life, learned how to work with meat. And now you suddenly have this new product group like legumes. They're new, not new, but for many people, not often.

Liesbeth: Yeah, it is for most people. It is true. Yeah, exactly.

Danielle: Well, we already touched on several of your research topics and interests already, but let's take a step back because could you provide us a bit with an overview of your primary area of research and its significance?

Liesbeth: Yeah. The area is really on food reward, and behavior. If you talk about the reward, we know that people engage in behaviors that are rewarding, that are really beneficial to them. When I talk about the reward, I use it in the broader sense. That could be any positive stimulus that generates a positive, effective experience. That's a bit of a difficult word, but it's about a reward can be physiological, cognitive, social, or even emotional. Then you can think about for products, it's the sweet taste is rewarding or that you feel comfortably full, what I just mentioned, or that you feel relaxed after eating a meal or a product. There's different elements that are positive while you experience it, and the idea is that over repeated consumption, that reinforces the behavior. The thing is, people are driven by immediate rewards. People want great taste. They want a price. It should be cheap, it should be convenient. But I, of course, work on health and sustainability, and that's a delayed reward. Health, that really takes time before you actually perceive it, cardiovascular health or prevention of dental caries. That's the thing. The positive thing, it's personal, so at least it's for you. But then the sustainability, that's delayed in time, and it's not even for you, it's for the greater good. What can you do? Can you play around with those different types of rewards? Can you make them immediately perceived? How I envisage that is that we know that rewards, different types of rewards, activate the same areas in the brain. So the rewards are interchangeable. So if you have a product, you take out the sugar, I don't know, it's rewarding, it has sweet taste, rewarding. Can you do something else to compensate that? It should not be in the product then, it could also be in the person itself or the context. You're together with other people. That's also rewarding. So can you play around with different types of rewards so that in the end, the overall experience is rewarding. Then actually, I have two research line. One is about reward, what happens over repeated consumption. It's really the dynamics of reward because we know it is dynamic, it can change. The other one is really focusing on measurements. Can we really accurately measure it? Then I go into more implicit ways of measurements in ecologically real-life context. Long story, but then lots of things happening in there.

Danielle: It's called dynamic, but it's dynamic.

Liesbeth: Yeah, it is dynamic.

Danielle: In your research, you also study behavior in the context of the full consumption experience. That's one of the things. Can you describe a bit more about this?

Liesbeth: Yeah. I really want to broaden it. Not only the taste of the product, and dish, it really goes beyond that. It's the full sensory journey. I'm always interested in the direct interaction for consumer with the product. That could be in the supermarket, a purchase moment, the cooking process, the opening of the pack, the eating, how do you handle everything. That includes the behavior then as well. Another aspect is that I don't want to only I focus on taste or the liking. I also want to go beyond that. If you eat it, I mentioned already a bit more the emotional part. I really focus also on the emotional experience during the eating because we know food is emotion. Eating is emotion. Or if you've eaten something, you can feel energized afterwards or feel relaxed. We know also that that's a way to differentiate yourself from other products. Most products are similar in liking. If you have more emotional connection to it, that gives a bit more bonding or you're more loyal to that because it gives something extra.

Danielle: That's again, that reward that you get from it.

Liesbeth: Exactly.

Danielle: Another part that I find always very interesting in our fields is the role of context. You also studied a lot on that, how it impacts perception and behavior. The whole thing around lab or in-home or ecologic validity. Can you talk a bit about that?

Liesbeth: I always use the example that people may know that you're on holidays and you're there and you get this new drink and then you love it. It's great taste. So you think, Oh, I buy a bottle, bring it back home. And then you're at home and you drink it and it's just not what you thought it was, right? Most of the time it's less light. And that's because of the context. You need this holiday experience. You are there on the beach with the sun and this relaxing atmosphere. So context is so key. It's so important in how we experience, but also shape our perceptions and how we feel with that. And that's why I think, if you then think about our research, what does that mean? When I learned that, sensory science, it was always in the sensory book, because then you could really take out all the other cues from the environment. You really control it as standardized as possible. So the temperature, the lightning, no destruction at all, really zooming in on the product, which is good. But at the same time, if you think about a real life situation, it's completely different.

Danielle: You mess it with it, yeah.

Liesbeth: When normally you eat a product with your family, your friends, or you're out, or I don't know, at work, in a context. So then I thought, okay, what can you do with that? More people, of course, are working in this domain. But can you bring the world into the lab or vice versa, the lab to the world? Because if you do research in real life with people at home, or it's less controlled, you don't know what people do with it. Sometimes I think it's better to bring it to the lab. I'm really working now with immersive technologies where you can try to recreate an experience or a context in the lab. You can beam up videos or-

Danielle: The immersive room.

Liesbeth: Yeah, this immersive room. The sound, there's maybe odors, and people feel really emerged. You're really engaged into it. Also, when I'm in there, I also notice that you can measure it. There's questionnaires for that to check it. It's controlled, but you bring in the cues from a contextual environment of specific interest. There you can play around, of course, with the different modalities and try to see if then also the measures are more accurate. We find that people are much better in the discrimination task. That's fascinating, right? We really build a better understanding on also the role of context in shaping those perceptions and also what you need to take into account and whatnot. Now, that's really immersive technologies, immersive context.

Danielle: And that has been developed a lot over the last year, indeed. It's so much more possible now.

Liesbeth: It is. And the next step is virtual technologies, of course. So far, I've not done that much because you have this headset, so you cannot see if you eat actual food. That's quite challenging.

Danielle: Yeah, with the new ones, you can.

Liesbeth: Exactly. Yeah, the development goes fast. So of course, that's next because it's even more, it's more immersive, right? I think that's really the way for it also. Yeah, it's really nice.

Danielle: Then you have the other angle, of course, also getting the lab more in the homes. Those smartwatches.

Liesbeth: Exactly. That's more in relation to the other part, implicit measures. What I do there, of course, we use a lot of questionnaires. That's still the golden standard. We also know that a lot you can do with questionnaires, but there's also, especially for emotions, if I ask you, "Hey, how do you feel?" Just thinking about it already can change how you feel, right? Because of all the cognitive processes underlying it, people find it difficult to also assess on how they feel. Then we thought maybe we can better go into more implicit measures so that you can measure it without asking. That's basically why I'm interested in the implicit part. Then you can think about heart rate or skin conductance or EEG, all those neurophysiological patterns that may be able to help also to better get a grip on the full experience again. We did research also with emotions where we were able, it was really exciting with EEG to identify different patterns. We had the cooking experience where people were stir-frying a dish either with meal warms, so discussed almost, really extreme, was it in the beginning, and chicken. Then you have this approach avoidance behaviors, of course, because people realize, "Oh, I'm going to cook with meal warms. Oh, I have to eat it." We could identify that in the patterns. That was really, really important and also exciting because all these meshes have a lot of noise in the data. You need to filter out this meaningful... Yeah, the meaningful data, actually. Then we were able to do so. But that was extreme stimuli differences. We are also working, of course, we need to go to subtle differences, which we tried, and so far we have not been successful. But it's an area I think we need to do more with because there you can measure it continuously. You can measure it without asking. Also, their developments go fast, so we are not there yet. We don't have the optimal measure yet. But I think it's worthwhile to keep on investing in that. Then not only do it in the lab, but then bring it to the real-life context so that maybe even remotely, you can measure that from a distance and see how consumers experience different products or dishes or whatever. So that's the other area.

Danielle: If we then think about your earlier comment about if consumers know that they are being measured, that they will change their behavior, like with emotions. Probably all these technologies that are developed that many more people are used, that they are 24 hours being measured.

Liesbeth: Exactly.

Danielle: Because so normal, probably the effect will be much...

Liesbeth: In the beginning, you're really focusing on it. You'd be like, Oh, I'm being measured. And then it's exciting. And after 1-2 days, you don't think about it anymore, and it's still there, but it's normal. Yeah, true.

Danielle: So you go to your normal behavior.

Liesbeth: Exactly.

Danielle: Nice. How do you envision the future of consumer research and how it can impact promoting healthier and more sustainable food choices?

Liesbeth: I think for the future, we have to challenge. My challenge is really about identification, but also the prediction and the true understanding of consumers' perceptions and behaviors. I think the challenge remains. It's all about better understanding, better prediction. But how we tackle that and how we approach that, that will be different. I think there we really get into the digital domain and all its related technologies. We have these massive amounts of data, this big data pool, and the way we can go much faster, more efficient because of that. We really reuse the data and really make sure that in that way, and that's, of course, what you do with your company, but really, if you do it cleverly, get to new insights much faster, much more efficient, and also more accurate. That's what I expect. It's quite big, actually. We're on this journey and we are not there yet, but it has gone fast. That's how I envisage it for the future.

Danielle: Nice. I see that we need to start wrapping up, Liesbeth, but I think many questions we have answered. Probably there are more, but maybe you can come back at some point.

Liesbeth: Maybe, yeah.

Danielle: But I would like to know, and we always ask this to our guests, what advice would you give to individuals who are new to the field of sensory science and who want to make an impact?

Liesbeth: Yeah, exactly. I like this question a lot. The more I get into my career, the further I realize that collaboration is absolutely key. There's this saying, "On your own, you go fast. Together, you go far." I think also that's absolutely true for sensory science. That's sensory science is a multidisciplinary field. You have psychology, psychophysics, data science, neuroscience, and so on. My advice is keep investing in these collaborations, build your networks, and really make sure, because at the interfaces, that's where the important innovations and technologies happen. That's actually, you really need to collaborate, be open to it, and while you're doing it, have fun, I would say.

Danielle: Yeah, very important. Okay, well, one final question, Liesbeth. If people want to contact you, how can they do that the best? Are you on LinkedIn?

Liesbeth: Yes, I'm on LinkedIn. And you can Google me. For sure, you see also the email from my university account. But I think LinkedIn is the best thing.

Danielle: We will add it to the page of the show. We will add your LinkedIn so that people can find you.

Liesbeth: Perfect.

Danielle: Well, it was great talking with you. Thank you so much for your time.

Liesbeth: Thank you.

Danielle: All the best.

Liesbeth: You too.

Danielle: Thank you.