Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Postharvest Biology and Technology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/postharvbio Quality perceptions regarding external appearance of apples: Insights from experts and consumers in four countries Sara R. Jaeger a, ⁎ , Lucía Antúnez b , Gastón Ares b , Marianne Swaney-Stueve c , David Jin a , F. Roger Harker a a The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, 120 Mt Albert Road, Private Bag 92169, Victoria Street West, Auckland, New Zealand b Sensometrics & Consumer Science, Instituto Polo Tecnológico de Pando, Facultad de Química, Universidad de la República, By Pass de Rutas 8 y 101 s/n, CP 91000, Pando, Uruguay c Sensory & Consumer Research Center, Kansas State University, 22201 W Innovation Drive, Olathe KS 66061, KS, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Fruit quality Defects Bruising Sorting Consumer research Postharvest Appearance ABSTRACT Apples, one of the most popular fruit worldwide, are globally traded and consumers benefit from hyper-com- petition in the industry. To remain profitable, producers must offer very high quality fruit at competitive prices. This research sought to better understand consumers’ quality perceptions. We focused on external appearance, a readily available quality cue. Insights were gained from a categorization task where participants sorted images of apples based on perceived quality. A comparison between experts’ (n = 37) and consumers’ (n = 297) quality perceptions based on external appearance revealed high similarity. Both groups considered fruit with minor defects as inferior to fruit with no external defects. The consumers, who represented four different countries (72–76 per country; loosely regarded as a proxy for the global population of apple consumers), perceived the quality of the apples very similarly. Three quality groupings were established, representing apples with high quality, minor defects and major defects, respectively. The last-mentioned grouping consisted of any apple that showed signs of rot or mold, or where there the skin had been cut. Blemishes and odd shapes were generally regarded as minor defects. Both types of defects were associated with negative hedonic expectations, which increased with the severity of the external defect. The implications for consumers’ purchase-related cognitions were clear and associated with rejecting consumption. This has associated implications for efforts to reduce food waste. 1. Introduction Apples are one of the most widely cultivated and consumed fruits worldwide (Tsao, 2016). The apple industry faces market saturation in terms of market supply, which has led to hyper-competition, i.e. intense competition based on price-quality positioning (Axelson and Axelson, 2000; Harker et al., 2003). In this context, producers need to deliver high quality fruit at the highest possible price point to remain profitable (Doerflinger et al., 2015). Fruit quality can be regarded as a complex construct pertaining to its ability to fulfil consumers’ needs and expectations (Barman et al., 2015) or to meet the standards for a specific use (Musacchi and Serra, 2018). From the consumers’ point of view, external fruit appearance is mainly determined by shape, size, color and the lack of defects, whereas internal quality is mainly shaped by flavor, texture and absence of defects (Musacchi and Serra, 2018). External quality is the main determinant of consumers’ choices at the point of purchase, whereas their decisions to repeat purchase are more strongly influenced by internal quality (Barman et al., 2015). For this reason, external quality plays a central role in the definition of quality standards, which are mainly based on morphometric attributes, product integrity, and lack of external appearance defects (Kyriacou and Rouphael, 2018). In particular, the long marketing chain of fruits makes physical damage during harvesting, grading, packing and dis- tribution through the supply chain a major cause of downgrading and postharvest loss (Opara and Pathare, 2014). A gap between commercial quality standards and consumers’ ex- pectations may exist (Kader, 2008), as the criteria underlying these standards are usually determined based on the perception of technical experts (OECD, 2010; Zhou et al., 2004). An in-depth understanding is still lacking of how the degree of different defects influences consumers’ quality perceptions and deters purchase (Kyriacou and Rouphael, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postharvbio.2018.08.014 Received 11 July 2018; Accepted 23 August 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: sara.jaeger@plantandfood.co.nz (S.R. Jaeger). Postharvest Biology and Technology 146 (2018) 99–107 Available online 30 August 2018 0925-5214/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T