How to know if you'll like a food before you buy it
Compare it with foods you already know you like: its main taste (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savoury or spicy), its texture and its smell. Star ratings tell you whether other people liked it, not whether you will, so a prediction based on your own taste is the most useful clue you can get.
Why reviews and star ratings often get it wrong for you
A 4.8-star rating is an average of strangers' palates. Taste differs from person to person in ways nobody chooses: sensitivity to some bitter tastes is partly genetic, and for some people coriander tastes of soap because of a gene near their smell receptors. So a food that most people love can honestly be a 3 for you, and one with mixed reviews can be your new favourite (more in why the same food can be a 9 for you and a 3 for someone else).
Clues you can check yourself
| Clue | What it tells you | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| The first ingredients | What it mostly tastes of | The back of the pack |
| Words like fermented, aged, smoked or pickled | Strong, sour or deep flavours | The name or the description |
| Cocoa percentage | How bitter chocolate is | The front of the pack |
| Mild, mature or extra mature | How strong a cheese is | The cheese label |
| Chilli symbols or the word spicy | How hot a dish or sauce is | The menu or the pack |
| Crunchy, chewy, creamy, jelly | How it feels in the mouth | The description |
5 steps before you buy
- Name the closest food you know. "Like a mango but more sour" is already a prediction.
- Check the main taste against what you like: do you enjoy sour, bitter or very sweet?
- Check the texture. For many people texture decides more than taste.
- Smell it if you can, at a fruit stall or a cheese counter. Much of what we call taste is really smell.
- Buy the smallest size, or get a prediction for your own taste first.
Where Taste10 fits
Photograph the product, the front and, if you like, the back with the ingredients, and Taste10 tells you what it is, what it tastes like and how well it fits your personal taste, as a score from 0 to 10 with the reason why. It works for products, drinks, dishes and whole menus. After you try it, rate it, and the next prediction fits you even better.
Know before you buy
Taste10 learns your personal taste and predicts how much you will enjoy a food, drink or dish before you try it, as a score from 0 to 10 with the reason why.
Taste10 is in testing. Want to try it early? Get in touch.
Questions and answers
Can you tell from the smell whether you will like a food?
Often, yes. Much of what we call taste is really smell, so a food whose smell you enjoy has a good chance.
Why do I dislike a food that everyone else loves?
Taste differs from person to person, partly for genetic reasons. A food can be excellent and still not suit your palate.
Are star ratings useful for food?
They tell you whether many people liked something. They cannot tell you whether you will, because they average many different tastes.
How does Taste10 know what I will like?
It learns your taste from a short setup, quick questions about foods and your ratings of what you actually tried, and predicts from that how much you will enjoy something new.
More about taste
- Why does coriander taste like soap to some people?
- How to stop being a picky eater as an adult
- Choosing in a foreign supermarket
Sources
- Kim, U. and colleagues (2003). Positional cloning of the human quantitative trait locus underlying taste sensitivity to phenylthiocarbamide. Science, 299, 1221–1225.
- Eriksson, N. and colleagues (2012). A genetic variant near olfactory receptor genes influences cilantro preference. Flavour, 1, 22. doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-1-22