Thanks for the comment and the followup comments by you and Michael, Ben. First, it’s really cool that Impossible was preferred to beef burgers in a blind test! Even if the test is not completely fair! Impossible has been around for a while, and obviously they would’ve been pretty excited to do a blind taste test earlier if they thought they could win, which is evidence that the product has improved somewhat over the years.
I want to quickly add an interesting tidbit I learned from food science practitioners[1] a while back:
Blind taste tests are not necessarily representative of “real” consumer food preferences.
By that, I mean I think most laymen who think about blind taste tests believe that there’s a Platonic taste attribute that’s captured well by blind taste tests (or captured except for some variance). So if Alice prefers A to B in a blind taste test, this means that Alice in some sense should like A more than B. And if she buys (at the same price) B instead of A at the supermarket, that means either she was tricked by good marketing, or she has idiosyncratic non-taste preferences that makes her prefer B to A (eg positive associations with eating B with family or something).
I think this is false. Blind taste tests are just pretty artificial, and they do not necessarily reflect real world conditions where people eat food. This difference is large enough to sometimes systematically bias results (hence the worry about differentially salted Impossible burgers and beef burgers).
People who regularly design taste tests usually know that there are easy ways that they can manipulate taste tests so people will prefer more X in a taste test, in ways that do not reflect more people wanting to buy more X in the real world. For example, I believe adding sugar regularly makes products more “tasty” in the sense of being more highly rated in a taste test. However, it is not in fact the case that adding high amounts of sugar automatically makes a product more commonly bought. This is generally understood as people in fact having genuinely different food preferences in taste test conditions than consumer real world decisions.
Concrete example: Pepsi consistentlyperforms better than Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. Yet most consumers consistently buy more Coke than Pepsi. Many people (including many marketers, like the writers of the hyperlinks above) believe that this is strong evidence that Coke just has really good brand/marketing, and is able to sell an inferior product well to the masses.
Personally, I’m not so sure. My current best guess is that this discrepancy is best explained by consumer’s genuine drink preferences being different in blind taste tests from real-world use cases. As a concrete operationalization, if people make generic knock-offs of Pepsi and Coke with alternative branding, I would expect faux Pepsi (that taste just like Pepsi) to perform better in blind tastes than faux Coke (that tastes just like Coke), but for more people to buy faux Coke anyway.
For Impossible specifically, I remember doing a blind taste test in 2016 between Impossible beef and regular beef, and thinking that personally I liked [2]the Impossible burger more. But I also remember distinctly that the Impossible burger had a much stronger umami taste, which naively seems to me like exactly the type of thing that more taste testers will prefer in blind test conditions than real-world conditions.
This is a pretty long-winded comment, but I hope other people finds this interesting!
This is lore, so it might well be false. I heard this from practitioners who sounded pretty confident, and it made logical sense to me, but this is different from the claims being actually empirically correct. Before writing this comment, I was hoping to find an academic source on this topic I can quickly summarize, but I was unable to find it quickly. So unfortunately my reasoning transparency here is basically on the level of “trust me bro :/”
To be clear I think it’s unlikely for this conclusion to be shared by most taste testers, for the aforementioned reason that if Impossible believed this, they would’ve done public taste tests way before 2023.
Thanks for the comment and the followup comments by you and Michael, Ben. First, it’s really cool that Impossible was preferred to beef burgers in a blind test! Even if the test is not completely fair! Impossible has been around for a while, and obviously they would’ve been pretty excited to do a blind taste test earlier if they thought they could win, which is evidence that the product has improved somewhat over the years.
I want to quickly add an interesting tidbit I learned from food science practitioners[1] a while back:
Blind taste tests are not necessarily representative of “real” consumer food preferences.
By that, I mean I think most laymen who think about blind taste tests believe that there’s a Platonic taste attribute that’s captured well by blind taste tests (or captured except for some variance). So if Alice prefers A to B in a blind taste test, this means that Alice in some sense should like A more than B. And if she buys (at the same price) B instead of A at the supermarket, that means either she was tricked by good marketing, or she has idiosyncratic non-taste preferences that makes her prefer B to A (eg positive associations with eating B with family or something).
I think this is false. Blind taste tests are just pretty artificial, and they do not necessarily reflect real world conditions where people eat food. This difference is large enough to sometimes systematically bias results (hence the worry about differentially salted Impossible burgers and beef burgers).
People who regularly design taste tests usually know that there are easy ways that they can manipulate taste tests so people will prefer more X in a taste test, in ways that do not reflect more people wanting to buy more X in the real world. For example, I believe adding sugar regularly makes products more “tasty” in the sense of being more highly rated in a taste test. However, it is not in fact the case that adding high amounts of sugar automatically makes a product more commonly bought. This is generally understood as people in fact having genuinely different food preferences in taste test conditions than consumer real world decisions.
Concrete example: Pepsi consistently performs better than Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. Yet most consumers consistently buy more Coke than Pepsi. Many people (including many marketers, like the writers of the hyperlinks above) believe that this is strong evidence that Coke just has really good brand/marketing, and is able to sell an inferior product well to the masses.
Personally, I’m not so sure. My current best guess is that this discrepancy is best explained by consumer’s genuine drink preferences being different in blind taste tests from real-world use cases. As a concrete operationalization, if people make generic knock-offs of Pepsi and Coke with alternative branding, I would expect faux Pepsi (that taste just like Pepsi) to perform better in blind tastes than faux Coke (that tastes just like Coke), but for more people to buy faux Coke anyway.
For Impossible specifically, I remember doing a blind taste test in 2016 between Impossible beef and regular beef, and thinking that personally I liked [2]the Impossible burger more. But I also remember distinctly that the Impossible burger had a much stronger umami taste, which naively seems to me like exactly the type of thing that more taste testers will prefer in blind test conditions than real-world conditions.
This is a pretty long-winded comment, but I hope other people finds this interesting!
This is lore, so it might well be false. I heard this from practitioners who sounded pretty confident, and it made logical sense to me, but this is different from the claims being actually empirically correct. Before writing this comment, I was hoping to find an academic source on this topic I can quickly summarize, but I was unable to find it quickly. So unfortunately my reasoning transparency here is basically on the level of “trust me bro :/”
To be clear I think it’s unlikely for this conclusion to be shared by most taste testers, for the aforementioned reason that if Impossible believed this, they would’ve done public taste tests way before 2023.