3.4.4. Insects Are Dirty/Filthy—All Consumers Considered

The percentages of consumers who agreed that insects are dirty-filthy trends lower than the first three concepts discussed (Figure 7). India, USA and Japan, are the top three countries associating insects with filth or dirt.

**Figure 7.** The reasons for not eating insect products—"Insects are dirty/filthy".

For those three countries, the percentages of consumers, ranged from approximately 60–70%. Less than 35% of Mexican consumers agreed with that statement, the lowest of all the countries. Peru and Thailand round out the three countries with the lowest agreement on this statement. This reason might be associated with previous perceptions or misconceptions about intoxicating bacteria, viruses, and parasites or the fact that some insects are connected to waste or decay material [25].

#### 3.4.5. Taste Not Good—All Consumers Considered

The consumers' responses to the agreement "I do not think it would taste good" (Figure 8) resemble results from the reason "Insects are dirty/filthy" (Figure 7). India, Japan, USA, and Russia are the countries with the highest percentage of people agreeing with this reason, all slightly higher than 60%. Mexico and Thailand showed the lowest percentage of people agreeing with that statement. Mexico was the only country where the disagreement response was higher than the agreement rate. It is important to highlight that "Taste not good" is the highest reason related to ingested sensory properties although the visual perception of insects or insect pieces may imply ingested effects. One caution is that a number of consumers choose "neither agree nor disagree", suggesting that consumers are not sure of how insect-based products would taste and are not confident that an insect based product would taste good. This may suggest that insects are not a barrier from an ingested sensory standpoint, per se, but that the visual perception of insects promotes associations with disgust or textures that would not be desirable. This is a great opportunity to conduct sensory discrimination tests to evaluate if consumers can differentiate between a regular product and an insect product and if they can to conduct descriptive sensory studies to determine the actual sensory differences in those products.

**Figure 8.** Reasons for not eating insect products—"I do not think it would taste good".

Several studies focused on the sensory aspect of overall liking to determine the consumer's behavior towards insect products [26–28]. The conclusions from those studies showed that the participants' overall liking was influenced by the appearance and taste. In addition, it was noted in some studies that the insect parts needed to be invisible for acceptance, which is similar to the findings related to appearance considerations in this study. In a small study with 26 students who were blindfolded and held their noses, slightly more than half could identify the processed insect samples from cheese, dried fish or bread [14]. The authors concluded that this indicated potential acceptance if consumers ate products containing insect flours or pastes where the consumers could not see the insects. In one study [26] of burgers, men rated the insect burger between the beef and lentil burger, with a preference for the mealworm and beef burger. It should be noted in all the prior studies, only those consumers who indicated they were willing and interested in eating insect-based products were used, which may skew results more positively.

#### 3.4.6. Color Would Not Be Good—All Consumers Considered

A further sensory consideration is color. Over 50% of the participants in India, Russia and Japan agreed that the color of an insect based product would not be good (Figure 9). Interestingly, the Latin American countries (Mexico, Peru, and Brazil) were the only countries where more or almost more consumers disagreed with that statement than agreed. It must be noted that this statement generated uncertainty (high percentages of neither agree nor disagree) similar to the statement "Insects are not safe to eat", suggesting that consumers simply were not sure what the impact of insect ingredients would be on color. Of course, if insect ingredients do result in a color issue, that color might be altered or fixed by adding natural and familiar colors to imitate the original color of a specific product category.

**Figure 9.** The reasons for not eating insect products—"Color would not be good".
