What
makes a good rice eating experience? What makes a consumer choose any
particular variety over another? It seems to have something to do with where
you live and what you have access to. AfricaRice researchers and students have
been finding out just how diverse African taste for rice really is.
Yield
is only one characteristic of a crop variety. For farmers and consumers it is
not necessarily the most important one. Since the mid-1990s, participatory
varietal selection (PVS) trials have shown time and again that even when yield
is the most important criterion in varietal selection, other factors are also
taken into consideration by rice farmers.
With
emphasis shifting toward demand-driven research encompassing the whole value
chain, it is perhaps time to focus breeding on consumer demands as well as
those of farmers.
“Products
are consumed for the characteristics they possess,” says Aliou Diagne,
AfricaRice program leader for policy, innovation systems and impact assessment.
“Variety choice depends on the attributes of the variety.”
AfricaRice
researchers have been conducting sensory (consumer acceptance) tests of
raw-milled and cooked rice in several West African countries to determine which
attributes are preferred by consumers. AfricaRice research assistant Mamadou
Fofana and colleagues visited four rice-consuming locations in Benin, testing
three NERICA, two imported and two local varieties with panels of 125
consumers.
The
locations differed in the availability of rice types: the port city and commercial
capital, Cotonou, has primarily imported rice on its markets; another location
had both imported and local varieties; while the other two locations had
imported, local and NERICA varieties available.
“Consumers
in all locations showed acceptance of the imported rices and of NERICA 1 in
relation to their appearance as milled rice,” says Fofana. “However, no
variety/brand received high scores of acceptance across all locations in terms
of the taste of cooked rice.” More precisely, only three varieties reached a
level of ‘liked’ in the sensory test of cooked rice — the two imported brands
and NERICA 4 — and that only in Cotonou.
Overall,
the results displayed vast disparities among locations and individuals in terms
of varietal acceptability once cooked, as even the least acceptable variety
found 21 supporters (out of the total of 500 testers) who either “liked it” or
“liked it very much”!
Saneliso
Mhlanga worked from McGill University (Canada) on data collected in Benin by
Soul-Kifouly Midingoyi of the Institut national de recherches agricoles du
Bénin (INRAB), who surveyed 546 households in both rural and urban areas of the
four geographical regions of the country — northeast, northwest, center and
south. “Across the country, consumers preferred and were willing to pay a
premium for short grains, desired aroma, white kernels, clean and unbroken
rice,” says Mhlanga. “The Beninese in general also prefer parboiled rice over
milled white rice.” Moreover, consumers clearly linked country of origin with
expected quality, always favoring imported brands over local varieties.
In
Nigeria, Olorunfemi Ogundele of the Nigeria Institute for Social and Economic
Research (NISER) found that the consumption and utilization of various types of
local rice are directly influenced by the diverse traditional food consumption
patterns in the country. For example, some consumers prefer a certain type of
local rice for a particular dish, most likely because of its taste, color and
stickiness after cooking.
The
physical and chemical characteristics of rice varieties are used by consumers
to identify and recognize the different types of rice in the market. Almost
half of the respondents in Ekiti State indicated the absence of foreign matter
as their first selection criterion, while those who ate local rice preferred
its taste over that of imported brands. This implies that the most important
discriminating factor between imported and local rice is the absence of foreign
matter.
Similar
observations were made in Niger State, where some people considered taste as
the most important criterion for selection, while others considered ease of
cooking and whiteness as the most important criteria — these two groups with
different preference criteria consumed different varieties.
“Thus,
absence of foreign matter and degree of whiteness seem to be the most important
physical characteristics for Nigerian consumers,” says Diagne, “while ease of
cooking and taste are the most important cooking and sensory properties.”
Similar
work has been conducted, or is ongoing, in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia,
Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Togo and Uganda.
“A major lesson from this work is
that we need to develop local varieties that are at least of equal quality with
the imported brands,” says AfricaRice crop ecophysiologist Koichi Futakuchi.
“Given that none of the varieties, including imported rice, tested by Fofana
and his team gained any level of broad acceptability across the whole country
in the sensory tests of cooked rice, it should be possible to develop varieties
and produce rice locally that is more acceptable than the imported brands. For milled rice, imported
rice is apparently an excellent example and a target for improvements in
postharvest practices and varietal quality characteristics.”
“The people of the African continent are very diverse,” says
grain-quality specialist John Manful, “so it is not surprising that consumer
preferences for rice are also diverse, both across and within countries.” This
is in stark contrast to a country like Japan, where consumer preferences are
very narrow, and consequently all rice work is geared to providing for those
preferences.
“This African diversity
is a good thing!” Manful declares. “It means that almost every variety with
good physical and milling properties that is developed is likely to find
acceptance somewhere on the continent.
” Within the framework of
the AfricaRice–Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) project
‘Enhancing food security in Africa through the improvement of rice postharvest
handling, marketing and the development of new rice-based products’, and the
new Rice Processing and Value Addition Task Force, Manful and others are
seeking to develop a catalog of consumer preferences across the continent and
within countries.
“This will entail knowing
what the main rice-based dishes in each place actually are, what rice
attributes those dishes require and which varieties have those attributes,”
explains Manful. “Then, we should be able to match varieties to countries and
populations.”
