A cross-cultural study of cereal food quality perception

Cereal food production and use show substantial heterogeneity across Europe. For a category central in most EU diets, cereal food quality perception is nevertheless surprisingly understudied. With this in mind, 357 Danish, Lithuanian, and Portuguese citizens were interviewed about the importance of several cues and dimensions in their evaluation of the perceived quality of bread, cookies, breakfast cereals, pasta, and vodka. Portuguese and Lithuanians consistently gave a significantly higher average importance than did their Danish counterparts to all the cues and quality dimensions considered for all products. Nevertheless, respondents in all three samples found expected quality dimensions to be much more important than both extrinsic and intrinsic cues across almost all product categories. Dimensions and cues like taste and country-of-origin were the most relevant to Lithuanians, whereas taste, label information and price were the most important for Danes. The cues and dimensions Portuguese found relevant were fairly different and more category-dependent. Cues like store type for bread, brand for breakfast cereals, pasta, and vodka, country-of-origin (COO) for vodka, and price for cookies, pasta, and vodka were more often assessed by the Portuguese as relevant for decision making at the point of purchase. This highlights the need for further cross-cultural research on food quality perception.