General Perspectives on Quality and Value
Most foods, especially those based on whole plant and animal tissue, have a highly complex structure and composition.
Chemical, physical and/or microbiological processes take place in foods during storage, which may alter some of these attributes.
Food structure and composition translate into sensory attributes and other performance aspects for the consumer.
What all this means is that, theoretically at least, hundreds of different attributes could be defined for individual foods.
Clearly, to specify food quality in those terms is impractical; more impracticably, it is inappropriate because quality does not refer to the totality of attributes a product possesses.
Instead, the quality concept introduces a filtering device through which attributes are weighted in terms of their contributions to user satisfaction with the product.
Therefore, the definition of product quality incorporates subjective elements.
Customer satisfaction means the customer’s perception of requirements having been fulfilled. Other models of quality include, in addition, the requirements of the other stakeholders in a process or product.
The value and the satisfaction consumers derive from a food product is therefore closely related to its quality.
In fact, both terms appear throughout the academic literature, although their use by different authors is not consistent.
General Perspectives on Quality and Value
