Unless you’ve been completely out of touch as a pork producer, you have probably heard that pork is facing a demand problem. Our beloved ‘high-volume’ pork-consuming Baby Boomers purchase more than 30 lb. of fresh pork per capita each year. Millennials purchase less than half that amount. Gen Z consumers purchase even less, and while some of them can’t drive yet, they don’t look like they are going to turn the tide.
This certainly calls for new marketing approaches to entice these younger consumers to try pork because surely when they try it, they will love it just as much. Or will they?
Putting the Palate to the Test
To see, we recruited 158 people from the Champaign-Urbana area—115 were under 40 (we’re a college town after all) and 43 were over 40. Each participant tasted chops from five different pork cuts, including the familiar loin chop and tenderloin as well as several alternative cuts. All chops were grilled and served as bite-sized samples. We asked participants to rate their liking of tenderness, juiciness and flavor of chops on a 9-point scale from dislike extremely to like extremely. They also rated their overall liking on the same scale, and we classified scores of 1-3 as disliked, 4-6 as neutral, and 7-9 as liked.
The Real Threat Isn’t “Dislike”—It’s “Just Okay”
The results revealed a clear age difference in how consumers responded to the pork. Younger consumers gave lower liking scores for tenderness, juiciness, flavor and overall liking than older consumers, regardless of the cut they were eating. The differences were modest—about half a point on a 9-point scale—but they showed up across the board.
More interesting was where those ratings fell on the scale. Across the five cuts, younger and older consumers had similar percentages of “dislike” ratings (8% vs. 6%). But younger consumers were much more likely to land in the neutral category (44% vs. 29%) and less likely to say they liked the pork (48% vs. 65%). Even for tenderloin, the most well-liked cut in the study, 24% of younger consumers rated it neutral compared with just 14% of older consumers. For the pork industry, “neutral” may be almost as important as “dislike.” In the competitive protein marketplace, “just okay” isn’t much of a reason to choose pork again.
Why Expectations Differ
So why do younger consumers seem less enthusiastic about pork chops? Honestly, we aren’t sure. Younger people have grown up in a world where less fresh pork is consumed and in a food environment that has shaped their food choices and expectations differently than those of older generations. They might have different expectations for tenderness, juiciness and flavor in their protein choices. Older consumers, meanwhile, have experienced decades of improvements in pork eating quality and therefore may have a different frame of reference for evaluating it.
Will Flavor Trump Tenderness?
One interesting takeaway from the study was the influence of flavor on overall liking. For all consumers, flavor was the biggest driver of overall liking for cuts other than the traditional loin chops. For younger consumers, flavor remained the biggest driver even for loin chops. Older consumers were different: for them, tenderness was more influential than flavor in determining how much they liked a loin chop. While the pork industry has historically put considerable emphasis on tenderness, flavor may deserve particular attention as we think about the next generation of pork consumers.
Bottom line: If younger consumers are harder to impress with our pork chops, we all need to understand what creates a pork eating experience for them that moves from fine to fantastic.
