Fabiana Carvalho on the Home Experience: Expanding the "Slow Coffee" Segment | Re:co Symposium 2020

Specialty coffee shops have assumed a particular role in providing memorable experiences to the consumer.

In the middle of a fast-paced modern lifestyle, specialty coffees have wholeheartedly embraced the slow coffee consumption philosophy, which is central in creating a delightful drinking experience. However, it is important to expand the market segment of slow coffee consumption to contexts other than the coffee shop. Due to distancing and mobility restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, specialty coffee consumption has been shifted from shops to home. Which marketing tools could be relevant to influence the coffee drinking experience outside the coffee shop? Results on the latest research showing how product-extrinsic factors influence consumers’ sensory and hedonic judgments of specialty coffee will be presented. The plain home consumption can be redefined into a more engaging “Home Experience”, which creates pleasure for the customer and adds value to the product. Multisensory exercises demonstrating the effect of different sound experiences and haptic textures on flavor perception of specialty coffee will also be presented.

About the Presenter

Dr. Fabiana Carvalho, Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Campinas

Fabiana Carvalho is a Brazilian neuroscientist who received her MSc in Biochemistry and her Ph.D. in Psychobiology studying neural processes of perception and memory. She has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a project investigating sensory perception as an anticipatory and constructive process instead of a mere passive and reactive process.

She is currently a collaborating researcher at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Her research project is focused on understanding multisensory flavor perception. She is interested in scrutinizing the influence of extrinsic factors (that is, ambiance factors) on the expectation and perception of flavor in specialty coffee. This research project, entitled “The Coffee Sensorium,” has been conducted under the supervision of Professor Charles Spence at the University of Oxford, UK.