Numerous options exist for lentils within the food and ingredient market. There is a mix of opinions amongst the industry stakeholders with respect to the best way to move forward - some believe the focus should be on building market demand for more whole grains in people’s diet, while others see the need to offer processed products (e.g. flour) or fractionated byproducts (e.g. protein, starches and fibers) to the food companies. Using neural network modeling, a group of researchers at the North Dakota State University recently forecasted the major market growth categories in the ingredient market for both pea and lentil. Their research findings, however, suffer from insufficient data specifically for lentils (as they are often lumped with “other pulse crops” in historic market data).

Our research attempts to answer this question by directly investigating stakeholders’ and consumers’ perceptions and willingness to purchase lentils and lentil-derived products in all its form. Without trying to do a full market assessment, we will investigate in Canada, as a proxy for the developed world, the differential value that individual consumers assign to the variable quality attributes that could be bred. The main goal is to explore the market positioning of lentils by comparison to a range of competitor products (e.g. pea, flax, chickpeas, etc.) in different food applications (e.g. snacks, baked goods, convenience meals).

Our research intends to answer:

• What would impact consumers’ choices and attitudes towards lentils and lentil products so that consumers would shift preferences from competitor products to lentils?
• Are consumers aware of lentils’ nutritional benefits and advantages (protein content, fiber, vitamins, mineral, low glycemic index, and low in saturated fat) over competitor products?
• What food attributes do consumers value most and how do they prefer to find out this information?
• How is consumers’ decision-making on willingness to purchase affected by information overload?

We plan to set up a range of discrete choice experiments to answers the questions mentioned above. Discrete choice experiments are well grounded in the theory of choice behaviour and random utility theory, and have been used in marketing research to study how consumers trade-off between different favoured product characteristics. During new product development, discrete choice methodologies have been shown to have the advantage of realistically describing current consumer needs and desires, which in turn leads to the optimization of existing products.

Besides getting consumers’ viewpoints, we will also conduct interviews with a number of pulse processors and suppliers of lentil ingredients. Our research questions would focus on their perception on the growing markets for health-oriented and/or plant-based food products, their plan to respond to these expanding markets and where they think lentils would fit, and their vision in terms of new developments in lentil processing and new food product R&D. We will combine the information provided by the pulse processors and food ingredient supplies together with the information obtained from lentil consumers to illustrate the market trends specifically for this crop. Our research findings will identify some of the gaps and opportunities within the lentil industry, and help refine our breeding efforts so that new varieties will add value in both our economy and society.