PI: Devrim Ikizler (Intelligent Analytics & Modeling)

Date Awarded: May 2022 (FSRF 2022-05-03)

Abstract (from final report):

this study, we consider two major questions. First, we analyze how a plant-based meat alternative’s customer ratings on major retailers affect its volume sold in the coming years. We find that with everything else being equal, a 0.1 points increase in average product ratings is associated with a 7.4% increase in its sales volume in 2022 (5.5% in 2021). Second, by utilizing unique review-level text data (64,872 reviews collected across 267 products) which encompasses soft information on customers’ sensory perceptions, we decompose average ratings into sensory product aspects such as taste, texture, smell, meat-alikeness, etc., using natural language processing, and estimate the positive and negative impacts of each sensory mention, towards the product rating left by an average customer. We find each mention of each aspect (in order of importance: taste, smell, health-nutrition, texture, saltiness, meat-alikeness, and versatility) affects the final product rating of the average customer in significantly different magnitudes, while a negative mention is on average 8.7 times more impactful than its positive counterpart. To our knowledge, this study is the first comprehensive product-level plant-based products sales study exploring the relationship between sales, prices, and customer satisfaction.

Further Information: Full report can be downloaded here.