Welcome to "AigoraCast", conversations with industry experts on how new technologies are transforming sensory and consumer science!
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Gie Liem is an associate professor in sensory and consumer science at Deakin University, CASS Food Research Centre in Melbourne Australia. He previously worked at the Monell Chemical Center in Philadelphia (USA) and Wageningen University and Unilever R&D (the Netherlands). His research is focused on sensory marketing and drivers of consumer food choice. He is part of the editorial board of Food Quality and Preference and an executive editor of the journal Appetite.
Gie Liem's email: gie.liem@deakin.edu.au
Transcript (Semi-automated, forgive typos!)
Danielle: Gie, welcome to the show.
Gie: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Danielle: You're welcome. Well, to kick things off and to help our audience get to know you, could you share your journey into the field of sensory and consumer science and what sparked your interest in this area?
Gie: Sure. It's funny because when I was thinking about it, I realized how old I am. When I was doing my bachelor's back in the Netherlands, I came across an article about food choice of children. What they tried to do is to improve the food choices of children by implementing a particular breakfast program. That sparked my attention to consumer research. In my second year, we had to do a literature review, and that was under the guidance of PhD students. I came across one particular topic, which was children's food choices, and I thought, "Hey, that's good. I'm going to do that." That was supervised by Liesbeth Zandstra, who was a PhD student at that time. I thought, "Oh, yeah, that's good." I did that, and that started it all. Then I wanted to do a master's thesis in that same area. Around that time, Gary Beauchamp, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, was visiting Wageningen University. Through my professor, I got in contact with him and I was able to do an internship at the Monell Center, and that led into a PhD. I did my PhD at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the Wageningen University. That was all about the taste perception of children. And towards the end of that PhD, I visited Pangborn, and I came across Liesbeth, who was working for Unilever, we started to talk, and that's how I landed the job at Unilever. And yeah, my supervisor was Liesbeth. While I was doing that, I was still working in the area of food choice for children. I really like that. Then I thought that the whole experience in the United States was pretty good. Me and my family, we wanted to do something different, and we decided to go to Australia. And that's how I ended up in Australia.
Danielle: Wow. Yeah, that's a whole journey. And now that you have experienced the Wageningen University, you work now in Deakin University. How would you compare the collaboration between universities and industry in Australia and compared to the EU and Netherlands?
Gie: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It's something that I've wondered in the past, say, 16 years myself. So one of the things that you can see in the Netherlands and also in the US is that collaboration between universities and industry, that's quite close. They work quite close together and that can have good and bad things. The good thing is that you do work on very relevant things that are very applicable. One of the things that you see in Australia is that we do that to a lesser extent. We do have food industry, but the food industry is not as big as in Europe and the United States. A lot of the large development centers that you now have in Wageningen, and also a lot of the development centers in the US, they don't have, most of them don't have a very strong base in Australia. That means that the whole development in terms of sensory is a little bit less developed. You've got really good research in in the universities, but that is less translated into industry.
Danielle: I see. Can you tell us a bit more about this sensory consumer science community in Australia and New Zealand, I expect they are...
Gie: Yeah, sure. It is Australia and New Zealand. Before I started at Deakin in 2018, they set up a group which is called the NZ-Aus, which stands for New Zealand Australia Sensory and Consumer Science. I've been part of that organizing committee since 2010. The whole idea of that committee was that because we're quite physically really far away from the rest of the world, it was quite expensive to go to conferences like Pangborn. The idea was that could we bring one of those speakers to Australia-New Zealand, to give us a workshop. Like a two-day workshop, we will pay all the expenses and everything. It wasn't that hard to find people because it's quite a good country. We had all the sensory and consumer scientists from New Zealand and Australia, so get it together. That started, you're going to laugh now, it started at a campsite. We used to have bunk nets and campsites. That has changed a little bit, but the idea is still the same. In the past, we had really good speakers, like Herb Meiselman, Julia Manela, Rick Schieferstein, and Hanson Treyp. They all came to Australia and did a workshop for us. That's about a group of 60 people. One of the things that is, and that's still the case, is that you could see that there are a lot of people from industry and academia. Although in industry, the sensory science is mainly focused on quality control. That's a little bit in contrast to what you see in big companies like Nestlé and Unilever, where sensory science is really embedded into the whole innovation tunnel from idea generation right to the launch of the product. You wouldn't only involve a sensory scientist once you've developed a product. You would involve a sensory-type scientist way before that, right? That's something that is less evident in Australia. A lot of the people in that, the group, are involved in sensory science, but mainly in quality control. But at the same time within, for example, Deakin University or the University of Queensland or in Adelaide with the wine industry, they've developed really good methodologies and really good insights into sensory science. When you go to Pangborn, you'll see a lot of these scientists coming from this part of the world. When you look at publications like Food Quality and Preference and Appetite, you can see that the majority or at least half of the publications are coming from Australia and New Zealand. There's a lot of development in that area, but not so much development within food industry. It has changed. When you now look at, I'm now speaking for Melbourne, which is an important part of Australia. You can see that a lot of our former PhD students now take over important positions within universities and within the industry. It slowly is changing because, say, about 10 years ago, the very important positions, I'm talking about people who were leading sensory science groups, either in industry or in the university. All those people came from elsewhere because they came either from, say, Ireland or the Netherlands or the US or New Zealand. Now you can see more and more people actually are out of our own kitchen, the Australian kitchen. That's a really good development.
Danielle: Yeah, indeed. Okay, interesting. You also co-authored a paper a while ago on this topic about the difference between how is sensory science in Australia, actually.
Gie: Yeah. That's been a while ago. That was in 2012. That was exactly just the analysis that I just gave you that, where do those people come from? I completely realized that everyone lives in a bubble, right? We live all in a bubble, and we think that we're right. I did check it with other people, just what is your view on it, on that sensory science? They agree with me. It's like, yeah, it's less developed. It's not only that connection or that not-so-strong connection between industry and the university, it also has to do a little bit with Australia itself. When you think about it, Australia is a big country. Europe is a little bit bigger, maybe 30% bigger. But we only have 27 million people here. Compared to Europe, where it's like I don't know how many, but a lot more. In terms of consumer base, the consumer base is just not really big. The other thing is that more than 90% of the people live in cities, and the cities are quite far away from one another. That means that in terms of transport of food, that has a big impact on that. The other thing that you can see that's related to that is that when you look at the retail industry, there's about two major food retailers. Can I name them? Or name and shame them?
Danielle: Yeah, you can..
Gie: Woolworths and Coles are the main food retailers. There's Aldi, there's IGA, but that is just minor players. 75% of the whole market is dominated by two. So what you see across the world is that whenever you have a situation like that, the more powerful a few retailers are, the more important their own brands become. So the brands that are owned by Coles, the private labels.
Danielle: Almost seen as A brands after a while, if you have a really-
Gie: Yeah, it's almost seen as A-brands, but that means that those brands need to innovate because they are so important, they need to innovate. You can see that in Switzerland, there's a lot of innovation in that area, and they are very important there. But it is always, it's always a play between private labels and, say, the A-brands. The A-brands come with something which is really innovative, the private label copy and paste it, and that encourages the other brands to develop something new. But because the Woolworths and Coles are so powerful, they can not only push their own brand into prime positions, they also determine what growers give to them, in what shape, et cetera. There's a lot of power. They can even have the power over land. Where do you build particular stores, et cetera. That whole power play is not really good for food innovation. That's another thing that you can see in the Australian market. But having said that, the Australian market is also very interesting because we're very much influenced by Asia. So Asia is around the corner, and that makes it extremely interesting. So when you think about it, about 50% of the Australians have parents, at least one parent, that was not born in Australia. So they come from elsewhere. Chinese is almost the second language besides English, in Australia. So it's a lot of influence from Asia. There's a lot of... You can see it everywhere. You can see it in the food retail stores, you can see it in the supermarkets, in the cafés, et cetera. That's what makes this country. So from a consumer science point of view, really interesting.
Danielle: So interesting. Yeah, indeed. You are working at the moment on a project supported by the Cellular Agriculture Australia focus on the perception and acceptance of cell-based, cell-cultured meat. Can you elaborate a bit more on that?
Gie: Yeah, sure. That is actually a very interesting one. When you think of Australia, you all think about now putting a shrimp on the barbie, which makes Australians really, really mad because we don't say shrimp, we say prawns. But that's... No, Australian will say shrimp. But Australia is a country of meatiers. We eat an immense amount of meat. We're amongst the highest meat consumers in the world. And that whole barbecue culture is It's indeed a part of our food culture. That makes it quite interesting that that so-cultivated meat is something that is of interest here in Australia, at least, to some big companies. They've invested millions in pilot plans, and they really want to roll it out. At the moment, it is under, not under an investigation, but it's in the approval process. The expectation is that it will be approved because when you look at the other markets like the United States or Israel or Singapore, that it has been approved there. There's all expectations that it will be approved here. The only thing is that we don't really know how consumers will respond to that. What you see is that in countries where there's a lot of food innovation, consumers are used to a lot of food innovation, that acceptance of new technologies is a lot easier. In Australia, it's a little bit different. I'm currently doing a couple of studies, and we started that two years ago. In this particular year, we're going to look at trust. How important is trust? Trust, not only trust in science, but also trust in government or trust in general, plays an important role in the adoption of any new food innovation, whether it be GMO or anything that's new. Trust plays a very important role because the same as in Europe, same as in the United. In the States, there's an increasing distance between the person and the food. That means that people want to know where their food comes from. People go to organic, people go to their own. If they eat meat, they talk to their butcher, and the butcher needs to know where the meat comes from. That thing, you see that here as well. That is very important because then they look at cell-cultured meat and they're like, "Hey, that comes out of a lab." But people have a very, in my view, very sort of distorted view of where their food comes from. If they were to look at where the beer comes from or where the wine comes from or anything that they think, "Oh, that's very good." They'll be surprised how clean and how clinical that is, right? But there's a lot of emotion involved in that. We really try to understand that because that gaining of trust and introducing of a new technology, that can take years, right? You could put something on the market. If you haven't worked on that trust and then how you communicate that to consumers, whether you call it cell-cultured meat, or we had a whole discussion with the organization about, okay, are we going to call it cell-cultured meat? Are we going to call it slaughter-free meat? That was quite interesting. We decided not to do that. Or they decided not to do that. But there's lab-grown meat and there is fake meat, and there's all these different words for it. The idea is that as an industry and as scientists, you have to be consistent in how you name it, and you're going to make sure that it doesn't have a very negative connotation. You don't want to associate it to killing or anything like that, right? Yeah, you got to stay away from that. That makes it extremely interesting.
Danielle: Now the stage is actually to really understand how to explain the product to consumers and how to get them to trust that they try it.
Gie: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. We want to know We've got a real suspicion that trust is very important. But where does that, how does that relate to, say, education? How does that relate to a social economic status or to where you live? Whether you live on a farm, whether you live in a city. What are you currently doing? Are you probably a vegetarian? It'd be a bit tricky. But when you eat, how much meat you eat, what's the emotion connotation to it? A lot of people think barbecue, that's something that's so much Australian, you're not going to take it away from me. There's a lot of emotion connected to that. In order to introduce something, it's exactly what you say. You need to know what is driving it and what the barriers are.
Danielle: Let's talk about some of the new technologies that greatly influence sensory science today. Because one key aspect of your research is really how to test context, how the testing context affects consumer responses. And you studied this impact of creating ecologically valid testing environments and how to set the right mindset for consumers. Can you elaborate?
Gie: Yeah, that's right. I just have one of my PhD students, Dr. Catherine Kola. She finished her PhD just on that issue. So she looked at different measurements, looking at virtual reality. Just published a study about comparing virtual reality with just a photo or the actual café or just in a sensory lab. One of the things that see is that it really depends on what the product is. If the product is, of course, very connected to the environment, then the environment itself has an impact on how you perceive it. One of the things that I'm interested in is looking at the online environment. We know from studies from many people, great scientists, that look at how important is that environment and how we perceive food. We know it's important because we know that if you, just to put this visual in your head, but if you eat a piece of chocolate in the toilet, be a bit different from eating that piece of chocolate on the beach or something. I mentioned that because we actually tested it out. We made a 360 recording in a toilet.
Danielle: No. Yeah, you did?
Gie: We made a 360 recording in a restaurant and we gave people pieces of chocolate to taste and see how they perceived it. Even if they knew that this is exactly the same piece of chocolate. You could see that it wasn't the same evaluation of it. It does have an impact.
Danielle: It's very extreme in your research.
Gie: Yeah, that's what Professor Keyser Graff taught me when I was a PhD student. He said, "Gie, if you want to find something, you got to stretch it out."
Danielle: Yeah. You have to always focus afterward.
Gie: Yeah, that's right. I've always considered that. That was very good advice from Keys. When you look at the environment as an impact, we know that. We also know that the online environment is an environment that becomes increasingly important because it's not only the space where we socialize, it's also the space where we order food. A lot of the things that are related to food, it's where we get our recipes, reviews, et cetera. The online environment plays an increasingly more important role. We wanted to look at if that environment of the online environment, and it can be just a picture or a description of a situation, whether that could impact your taste perception or your desire to consume different foods. A while back, Professor Wender Bredie from the Copenhagen University published a paper about a beach, and he looked at what a virtual beach would increase your desire for cold foods. We thought, "Oh, that's interesting." We wanted to do something similar, but we thought, "Hey, but how do you connect with an environment?" You basically use all your senses. So your senses are the gateway or the connection between you and the environment. So when you're on a beach, you see something, you smell the beach, you can taste the salt, you can feel the scent, etc. And we thought, "Hey, if we now systematically walk people through that experience, not only showing them a beach, but really walk them through the experience, are they going to have an increased awareness of being on that beach?" So the feeling of presence. Does that relate then to what they desire? The idea is that the more you feel present on that beach because I systematically walk you through all those sensory experiences, the more you're going to have that a desire for that food. That's exactly what happened, right? You saw that when you compared just looking at a beach, in one case, we had a neutral description. We said, "Oh, this beach is 50 kilometers long." It's Australia, so it's 50 kilometers long. It closes at 6:00 at night or whatever, and the sun rises then. So not sensory-related information. We compared it to a description of that beach. You feel the sand, you can hear the waves, etc. We saw that not only did that description increase the sense of presence or the feeling of presence, it also increased the desire of foods that were aligned with that situation. That's interesting because it partly means that maybe you don't necessarily need very sophisticated equipment to let people feel that they are present in a particular environment. If they're systematically walking through that experience. We recently published a paper in Appetite about that. That was about a busy environment and a nature environment. That relates a little bit to the idea that if you look at nature, you'd be more relaxed. That's related to the attention restoration theory that you can recharge your battery to really focus on something. We wanted to see if that had an impact on food choices, and it does. But again, the same principle of walking them through that nature environment, through that sensory description. You can see the same thing. Giving them a sensory description means that they have desire, they increase desire for food that are aligned or congruent with that environment. That's very interesting. That's that particular piece of research.
Danielle: The effect of storytelling and getting people with just by verbally, by just explaining it might be just as strong as maybe even stronger than fancy virtual reality room or something. I would say, if you don't do the talking next to it, describing the feeling, it might not be so strong.
Gie: Yeah, and then that's exactly it. Because one of the things that I think is that... So we can give them a particular situation, but the thing is that people experience that in a different way. If you say, I'm going to show you a kitchen, it might not be your kitchen. You may not feel that that's my kitchen and that's where I do my cooking. But if you say, well, think about your own kitchen, think about what you see in your own kitchen, you bring them back to that particular situation. I think that is the advantage. Not to say that there's no place for virtual reality. There is a place for virtual reality, but I think it's really good to look at how it all combines. Then you can take it a step further. You can say, "Okay, let's look at the different senses that we have and then systematically introduce auditory stimuli or visual or smell and see how that increases their feeling of presence. Is visual more important than smell? We know that maybe you say, "Oh, vision is very important." We also know that smell can be extremely, extremely important trigger for memories. People with dementia can smell something and not be able to verbalize what they smell, but it brings them back to a particular situation a long time ago, right? Extremely powerful stuff.
Danielle: Yeah, that's a bit, of course, different, but also in the same area as what the research that we did with IOWA University where before discrimination testing, that if you give them more of a context and let them think more about the products that they are going to taste, that they perform much better. That was done without virtual reality or anything. But I think indeed, both can enhance each other even more. Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Gie: It's a little bit sideways-related. I published a while ago, a paper with children looking at whether if you walk them through the task and increase their attention to the task, is that going to increase their ability to discriminate between different stimuli, and it does. So yeah, there's a lot to say there where the instructions play a huge role in what people are, in sensory terms, able to do.
Danielle: Yeah, Yeah. And if we look to the future, what are the things? Because you are working a lot on innovation, both in terms of innovative products, but also innovative methodologies that you develop or approaches. What are things that you look forward to that you're working on or that you might think that will be developed over the years? Are there any thoughts on that?
Gie: Yeah, sure. For me, it comes down to ecological validity. Anything that we do in the sensory space, it's one thing that we can measure it. But what does that measurement mean? What does it mean in in reality? That comes back to my first point about that connection between food industry and academia. The things that we figure out is interesting. You can write a nice paper about that, but who's going to do anything with that? I think that's where the the NZ-AUS can play an important role that they understand that, "hey, that stuff that those scientists do in their lab can actually be used." In the future, I really would like to see a closer connection between the two, that it can really apply. Because a lot of times that I've noticed is that people have a particular view about scientific research. Somebody jokingly said to me, research makes the company slow. That was quite funny to say that, but I don't think that's the case, though. But it is sometimes viewed in that way that, "Oh, these are the researchers, right?" They're so focused on one particular thing. The PhD students, that's really people with a PhD have no place in a particular company. That's a very ancient thought, but It is something that I have come across because they don't understand what you can actually do with that PhD. It's not only about nerdy-nerdy sitting in the lab and only doing one thing. It teaches you many, many skills. I think that's where now we get more people with a PhD in prime positions, and they are able to understand what it is, and that's where it's going to make a difference. It's not so much saying that everyone's got to do a PhD. Absolutely not. There's a place for everything, right? But at least have an understanding of what we try to do within that education. The other thing is that I would really want to see, and I know it's a wish probably across the world, are there dedicated courses for sensory scientists? Are there dedicated masters or dedicated bachelors? Because at the moment, what you often see is that, for example, say, a flavor chemist or somebody in chemistry got into the sensory field, but don't have that human or sensory background, which is okay. But I think if we're able to build something like a sensory masters or something in Australia, that would be really good because there are jobs for that. What we see with our own PhD students is that, they don't have trouble finding jobs. I talked to other PhDs students and they're like, "Oh, yes, really hard to find a job, right?"
Danielle: Not in our field.
Gie: Not in our field. No, it's remarkable how easy they get jobs. I was just in contact with a company, that's a research company, and she said, "Oh, Gie, we've got jobs, but where are the people?
Danielle: But like we said, sensory, it plays a very central role in every company because it has relations to everything. To quality. To marketing. To product development. It's very central.
Gie: I think that's interesting that you bring that up. When you think about a large company where they have marketing, consumer market insights, brand developers, these are the bigger companies where that whole marketing is split out into different functions. But even then, even if they have that, the connection between the sensory departments and say consumer market insights, I think that often can be improved. When I was working for Unilever, I was working with this consumer market insight manager, great guy, and he was like, "Oh, I didn't know you did that. Oh, this is very useful actually, because this is just what we need." You just need those connections to really build that. That's for a big company like Unilever. Can you imagine what it would do here when there's even a larger divide between those functions?
Danielle: Yeah, we see, of course, a lot of companies, and I see only a few where sensory is really at a corporate level present.
Gie: Yeah, so that's what you want. Just to bring you back to something that Professor Keyser Graff told me as well. He said, Gie, actually sensory is everything. Okay, he's a professor in sensory science, so of course, he's going to say that. But when I thought about it, it's like, actually, there is a lot to say about that.
Danielle: It is how we interact with the world. Our senses is the only way that brings us into reality.
Gie: Yeah, that's right. I think within our sensory field, there's a lot of things that, of course, we can learn from other fields, like psychology or sociology. There's a lot of things that we probably ignore. This was also highlighted many years ago, we need to work a lot more within that field than we currently do. I think, and that's been years ago that he said that, and I'm like, Hmm, it's probably still. It has been picked up, I think. No, it has been picked up. It certainly has been picked up. Well, hopefully, because otherwise, we haven't been making any progress in the past 20 years. But yeah, so there's a lot of, when you, just go back to when we started this conversation about when you started, the first time that I saw that article and I got in contact with Liesbeth Zandstra to where I am now, I'm like, there's a lot of things has happened, but some of the things are still the same. But you can see how different thoughts are being very important, at least for my career, but also different people play a very central role in where I am am now. If there's one thing that I know is that there's a lot of things I don't know, that's probably...
Danielle: It's even more as that you thought that it start.
Gie: Yeah, that's always a bit frustrating that when you don't know a lot, you think you know a lot. When you know a lot, you think you don't know a lot.
Danielle: Yeah, well, this brings me to, because we need to start wrapping up. But it's a nice bridge to my final question, because what advice would you give to individuals who are new to the field of sensory science and are looking to develop and make an impact here?
Gie: I think your network is extremely important. Working with people, understanding, listening to people is very important, I think. If you're very early in your career, talk to your supervisor and say, "Hey, can you introduce me maybe to key people?" It's very difficult to do that as a starting A PhD student. I remember when I was a young PhD student and I came across an American PhD student and he was happy to go to one of the giants in the field and just introduce himself. I'm like, I'm never going to do that. No, I'm far too shy. I really needed that help from my supervisors and my American supervisor in case they were great in that. Also, look outside your field. The time that I had with Unilever was really so important for who I am now, the way I look at things. Just an understanding of how food industry works, understand how they look at things, it really greatly helped me throughout my career. As a big advice, is look beyond just your bubble, which is difficult, and try to connect with as many people as you want. What you will see is when you talk to people and you're interested in what they do, they'll give you a lot of information.
Danielle: Very valuable advice, Gie. One more question. If people want to contact you, what is the best way?
Gie: Probably email. LinkedIn gets into my email anyway, but, probably just email me. It's gie.liem@deakin.edu.au.
Danielle: Great. I will add it also to the description of the podcast so that people can use that. Okay, great. Well, Gie, thank you so much for this conversation.
Gie: Yeah, it was a nice conversation. Good to talk to you.
Danielle: Yeah, very good to talk. Okay, thank you and goodbye.
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