Pressure children put on parents is estimated by experts to influence household spending worldwide of US$130 billion a year. Youngsters also independently spend more than $6 billion.
Tips for attracting this lucrative food market were presented last month in FOODtechnology. Contributing editor Les Watkins reports on taste differences between boys and girls.
Girls tend to be much more taste and touch sensitive about food than boys. That is the verdict reached by Dr Bryan Urbick of the UK’s Consumer Knowledge Centre after extensive international research.
In a recently-released book, Developing Children’s Food Products**, he says: “Although there are ‘picky eaters’ in both genders, girls seem to exhibit a higher level of pickiness overall”.
That’s why he recommends that any fine-tuning on the taste of new products be done initially with girls and then, as a double check, with boys. “We most often find that if you get the taste right for girls you have probably got it right for boys as well,” he adds. “But the reciprocal is not true.”He has noted strong recurring patterns in attitudes to eating.
“Girls seem to more enjoy sharing food with their friends than boys and we continually find that products that support this have an advantage with girls over those that do not.
“Taste quality is more important for them than quantity”.
Boys generally “eat to eat rather than merely to taste”.
“Boys are more frequently happy to eat alone, and they are willing to do so because then they do not have to share,” says Dr Urbick. “This is also often evident in the way they eat – large mouthfuls rapidly consumed. This could be linked to hunger and the higher calorie requirements of boys but this author suspects that it is also linked to their innate selfishness with regard to food.
“Quantity (or more accurately, the perception of quantity) is an important deciding factor in food and beverage choice for boys. This does not mean that they do not care about taste – they do – but they are more likely to sacrifice taste for quantity….
“It is one of the big decision factors when deciding what foods and beverages to have.
“If nutrition is at all interesting (and that is a bigger ‘if’ than with girls) it is frequently driven by boys’ desire to perform better at sports or other activities (even computers and computer games).
“Surprisingly, they are more able to take a longer-term view when it comes to performance and have more patience than girls (with regards to nutrition) to realise the effect of change”.
*** Developing Children’s Food Products (ISBN 978 1 84569 431 9), edited by David Kilcast and Fiona Angus, retailing at US$210 +P&P, which was released in February by Woodhouse Publishing, Sawston, Cambridge, UK.
