WHAT

IS FOOD

QUALITY?

by
Marie Ferree
University of California
Berkeley, California

Presents the various aspects of

food quality from the consumers
viewpoint.

Its a nice tidy

What is food quality?
Iittlequestion withas many answers as there
are people to give them, To come up with a
workable answer, Isearched through the files,
discussed the question of quality with some
consumers and I even gave the subject some
thought. And I found an answer in the form
quality?
of a question.
What is food
Quality of what, and according to whom?
Definitions
of quality include the
precise: Thedistinctivet rait, characteristic, capacity or virtue of a product that
sets it apart from all others. Quality,
according to the 1970 Yearbook of Agriculture, is the measure or expression of goodness.
When I asked one homemaker what
quality meant to her she said, Ask
my
neighbor she really knows quality food. A
definition of quality I picked up while
attending an industry meeting is Quality is
what you think the competition thinks the
standard is. Put still another way quality
turns out to be the standard the consumer
will accept.
There is little need to emphasize the
point that family and institutional
food
buyers have a somewhat different set of
quality standards from that of other buyers
within the food production and distribution
system.
Concerns of people involved in food
production, processing and distribution include selection and use of plants and animals which will produce characteristics of
performance excellence related toharvesting,
shipping, processing, and shelf life, Characteristics of performance excellence do, of
February 73/page 34

course, include factors of food safety and

I say of course there is
nutritive valued
concern for food safety and nutritive value
although, there seems to be considerable
difficulty proving concern for either when
confronted by consumer advocates.
Food buyers are concerned about some
of these same characteristics of excellence.
Lacking the
They express them differently,
objective measuring devices of other segments
of the production, processing and distribution system, consumers rely on judgments of
color, feel texture, odor, sound and the
written word. When the opportunity presents
itself, the food buyer may also take advantage of the judgment of taste.
We have been told, at times in rather
strident tones, that consumers chief concerns relate to food safety and nutritive
value:
--

.-

--

That consumers fear nutritive

value is lost in processing
and no attempt is made to restore it.
That nutrients and other food
ingredients are added to foods
far beyond safe limits.
That pesticide, herbicide, and
recently, that some hormone
residues are present in the
food Supply.

I did a count of questions that come

into our Public Service Department and discovered that of 500 questions over the past
10 months, 400 of them were directly concerned with food.
Presumably, these 400
questions should give some clues to what
concerns consu-mers. Bear in mind, please,
this Public Service Department is located
at the University of California, Berkeley,
where all sorts of craziness, food craziness
included, is reputed to have its roots.
Journal of Food Distribution Research

A little more than half the questions

asked, 56%, were direct requests for howHOW can I pickle olives? was
to-do-it.
the question asked most often.
what can I
Other questions included:
do with a tree full of lemons? Can I
freeze coconut? Could you sendme a recipe
for baking a whole sa.lmon?r
About 33%of the questions were directly
Where can I get
concerned with nutrition:
a list of the nutritive value of different
foods?rr rArevitamins in pills the same as
vitamins in food?rr rrwhat cheeses are low
in fat?rr
rHow many calories in Ricotta
cheese and in cottage cheese?r
concernqd
About 5% of the questions
rMygrandmother
dies
recently
food safety:
and left a large number of cans of home
canned pickles, fruits and vegetables. . .
are they safe to eat? Are juniper berries
safe to eat? How can you tell if tuna is
My freezer
contaminated with botulism?
was off for two days. . can I refreeze the
vegetables and pork chops?r
concerned
About 3% of the questions
meat grades and labeling: Is a meat market
allowed to package round steak cut in small
pieces, label it stroganoff beef and sell
it for a higher price than the piece of
rWhat is the
round steak in one piece?r
How much fat is in
best grade of beef?
regular ground beef in the supermarket?
It was difficult to classify 3% of the
What is a kiwi?r Where can I
questions:
buy eels? and Are guinea pigs edible?
Im still not sure
Was it a
pig question.
Nutrition?
Preparation?
pig had become a storage

about the guinea

problem of safety?
Maybe the quinea
problem.

Food buyers have specific performance

expectations for food: they expect meat to
salad
be tender when cooked; they expect
greens tobe crisp; they expect the packaged
flour mix to turn out a product that is acceptable to the family or clientele; they
expect canned peaches to live up to the
descriptive label; they expect frozen dinners
to satisfy the appetite.

Journal of Food Distribution Research

Food buyers put a high priority on eye

Well
appeal of fresh foods in the market.
colored fruits and vegetables, uniform sizes
and products that are free of any kind of
damage will get agood rating from most food
Yet they know intuitively or by
buyers .
whatever sixth sense food buyers use, that
color isnt the reliable guide to quality.
never
If you dont~elieve
it you have
watched food buyers perform their food buying chores.
Because color and uniformsize get considerable emphasis from other segments of
the marketing system, consumers perhaps give
these two factors a little too much emphasis
Exterior color
but that is the way it is.
often has little to do with whats inside
and uniform sizes do not indicate how good
But what other factors
or bad a food is.
can the food buyer judge?
At the meat counter, the food buyer
relies on the reputation of the food store
or on grades, or brand names as guides to
When you dig into food shoppers
quality.
judgments of meat quality factors, you get
a mixed bag and they may or may not match
government and industrys judgment.
We are all familiar with the studies
done of consumer preferences for beef, in
which the preference turns out to result
from the halo effect of the word Choice,
rather than any accurate judgment of quality
on the part of the food shopper.
tastes,
Palatability, the way food
ranks high on the family and institutional
foodbuyers list of quality standards. Yet,
this is one quality factor the buyer can
rarely judge until after the sales transaction. Indeed, there are maturity standards
for practically everything that grows--livestock, poultry, cereal, fruits and vegetables.
The standards relate, or are supposed to, to
palatability,
And there are palatability
standards for processed foods.
But the
standards lose something in the translation.
Immature fruits and vegetables still appear
in the market; overmature peas, beans and
cornare still processed; the word rseasoningr
on the package labels of processed
foods
(especially mixtures) translates too much
salt.

February 73/page

35

So what is quality? Quality of food

includes all those characteristics of excellence that make it acceptable to the food
buyer. The fact that food quality turns out
to be the standard consumers will accept
doesnt have to be a bad thing. The majority of consumers find acceptable
product
quality in the market,
They must, estimates
vary, but it appears that shoppers in food
markets make choices at the rate of about
4 per second.
Shoppers do take sanitation
and safety of food pretty much for granted.
Another measure of how well quality
standards meet consumers expectations is
that it has taken 20 years to get a real
consumer movement under way. And we arent
hearing the majority of consumers, we hear
the crusaders, those who will save us in
spite of ourselves.
What they advocate is
good.
But the results of the crusade were
obvious a long time ago. And the decisions

that have brought nutrition labeling, inmeasure

gredient labeling and price per
should have been made without the high pressure and invective that finally precipitated
them. And if you think all this additional
information is the end to making better food
shoppers-- you are wrong. We may be better
educated, more sophisticated and have access
to a better commodity system.
It will be well worthwhile, starting
now, to listen more closely to the real
consumers .
Hear them when they say they
like
want fresh strawberries that taste
that
fresh strawberries,
fresh tomatoes
taste like fresh tomatoes, and ripe peaches,
plums and melons.
If you insist that little can be done
in guaranteeing good flavor characteristics
of fresh foods my only reaction is why not?

?:>C>k >;>;;;

February 73/page 36

Journal of Food Distribution Research