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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how vegetable side components (carrot and broccoli) influence children’s associations and expected liking of two common Norwegian dishes (meatballs and salmon).

Children aged 11-12 years old were recruited to complete an adapted free association test (n=89). Each participant was exposed to four pictures of dishes that included combinations of the experimental food items served with potatoes and sauce. Participants stated their immediate associations and how much they liked each meal on a five-point smiley face scale for children. Evoked associations were coded and categorized before the relationship between the expected liking of the dishes and the associations were visualized based on correspondence analysis.

The authors found that the expected liking of the dishes was significantly affected by the composition of the dish, that the associations related to the meal changed when the vegetable component changed, and that children’s associations to food are quite similar to what previous studies have found for adults.

How children categorize complex dishes and how their mental representation explains expected liking has rarely been investigated before. By investigating how dishes with different components activate different associations and how these associations co-occur with children’s expected liking of the dishes, the authors gain knowledge that can help us develop strategies for improved dietary change.

The paper seeks to provide a picture of the profile of European traditional food consumers (TFC) in terms of their socio‐demographics, attitudes, life‐style orientations and behavioural characteristics.

Cross‐sectional data were collected through a pan‐European consumer survey (n=4,828) conducted in November and December 2007, with samples representative for gender, age and region, collected from six European countries: Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Poland and Norway. First, information about the consumption of traditional food and the image of a typical TFC was provided through descriptive analysis. Next, the actual characteristics of TFC were assessed using partial least squares regression and these were discussed in the context of the theory of self‐image congruity.

Traditional food consumption patterns are stronger in the south than in the north of Europe. TFC across Europe are typically middle‐aged to elderly, health‐conscious, ethnocentric, food connoisseurs, who are attached to familiarity in their food choices and who very much enjoy cooking.

The information about the profile, the image and the actual characteristics of TFC has practical implications for marketing and communicating about traditional foods, including their identification, differentiation, research and development and positioning in the European food market.

Traditional food is currently undergoing a revival, with increased sales, consumer and regulatory interest. This paper provides cross‐cultural results from a large pan‐European consumer sample that provides highly relevant and useful information about the market potentials of the traditional food industry, which mostly consists of small‐and medium‐sized enterprises. The application of the self‐image congruity theory to validate the results contributes to the originality of the paper.

This study aims to identify how Spanish consumers’ extrinsic preferences for food have evolved by examining the extant literature on food preferences in Spain, focusing on food-related attributes and food-related values.

This study is based on a synthetic review of the extant academic literature on Spanish consumer preferences for food-related attributes and food-related values from the mid-20th to the 21st century. This study uses key economic and social milestones that are most likely to influence food value chain actors to show how consumer preferences have evolved over the study period.

Spanish consumer food attribute preferences expanded as the food sector of the nation continued to grow, and value preferences showed a similar pattern from the mid-20th to the 21st century. The drivers of these preferences were trust, lifestyle, education (campaigns), sociodemographic factors and purchasing power.

Evaluating the extant literature’s contribution to consumer preferences for food-related attributes and values is important because it can aid in understanding the hierarchy and variety of consumers’ food preferences as well as the factors that drive these preferences. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore how Spanish consumer preferences evolved between the mid-20th and 21st centuries.