Ilja Croijmans on Talking About Flavors Online: Describing Coffee (and Wine) | Re:co Symposium 2020

Sales increasingly take place online; the specialty coffee industry has to deal with this creatively.

Whereas in normal consumer interactions, where there are more channels to communicate flavors, an online situation has reduced this to language, in the form of descriptions of how something will taste. Studies on wine show flavor descriptions help consumers to select the wine they want, suggesting coffee professionals might be able to learn from the wine industry to shape their descriptions. In this talk, Dr. Croijmans will go into recent studies that have looked at wine and coffee language, offer suggestions to adapt online coffee sales, and discuss open questions to align coffee descriptions to what consumers expect, informed by insights from wine and coffee research.

About the Presenter

Dr. Ilja Croijmans, Postdoctoral Researcher
Utrecht University

Dr. Croijmans research focused on what the effect of flavor expertise, with a particular focus on wine and coffee expertise, is on the way people describe and memorize smells and tastes. He obtained his Ph.D. on this topic in 2018 from the Dutch Radboud University. In his current lines of work, he investigates the effect smell, including body odor, has on our behavior and emotions. In addition, he maintains a strong interest in what factors can influence the ability to talk about smells and flavors, both in the digital as well as the real world.