Functional bread and neuroscience explained
- Measuring brain activity alongside survey feedback can help bakers investigate consumer reactions that tasting questionnaires may miss.
- Sensory neuroscience could help developers assess how much variation in texture and aftertaste shoppers will accept.
- Millbio’s research with Thimus suggests functional messaging can shape expectations differently across generations.
- Connecting neuroscience findings with purchasing behaviour could help manufacturers make better formulation and packaging decisions.
Adding fibre, protein or pulse flours to bread gives manufacturers more to think about than the nutritional numbers. Changes in texture and aftertaste can leave developers wrestling with how far to push a formulation before shoppers lose their appetite for it, and a favourable tasting-panel score may offer little explanation of why one version works better than another.
Sensory neuroscience brings another source of evidence into that process by recording electrical brain activity while consumers eat. Analysing those readings alongside survey answers allows researchers to investigate responses that participants may struggle to describe, as well as how expectations influence their experience of the food.
Two Italian companies – bakery ingredients supplier Millbio and consumer neuroscience specialist Thimus – are exploring those questions. Their research tested bread made with Millbio’s new concentrate, which combines fibres, protein, sprouted grains, pulse flours and active sourdough to help bakers develop nutrient-dense loaves for the growing GLP-1 market.
Mario Ubiali, founder and CEO of Brescia-basec Thimus, says neuroscience can help bakers judge both the formulation and how it’s presented. “First, it helps formulators calibrate how much variation in texture and aftertaste consumers will actually tolerate,” he says. “Second, it helps producers and retailers frame the narrative around the product in a way that enhances the implicit sensory experience itself.”
What happens during the bite
A questionnaire asks consumers to turn an eating experience into words or scores. While that’s useful, Ubiali argues that it captures only the responses people can recognise and explain.
“A questionnaire only captures what people are willing and able to articulate,” he says. “There’s a good portion of consumers who assume that ‘functional doesn’t taste as good’ – our data is often about testing whether that assumption is even true.”
Thimus uses its T-Box system, which includes an electroencephalography (EEG) headset that records electrical brain activity as consumers taste food. Electrodes placed on the scalp pick up the electrical signals, giving researchers recordings to analyse alongside participants’ answers to survey questions.
Ubiali says Thimus derives indicators of likeability, emotional engagement and familiarity from those recordings. These are interpreted measures: the researchers analyse patterns in the signal and compare them with consumers’ stated responses to build an account of the experience.
“Our analysis starts from those raw mental states and layers them against declarative survey data, so what people actually say, to develop actionable insights to address in formulation, packaging or experience design,” he says.
The attraction for manufacturers is the chance to investigate why apparently positive feedback doesn’t always produce an appealing product. A shopper might approve of a loaf’s nutritional credentials without particularly enjoying it or expect disappointment from its description before discovering that they like the bread.
Those reactions call for different decisions. A loaf that disappoints on taste may need reformulating, while one that tastes better than its description suggests may need a more appetising introduction.
Getting that decision right matters because shoppers still put taste ahead of health when deciding what to buy. The International Food Information Council Foundation’s (IFIC) 2026 Food & Health Survey found that taste influenced food and beverage purchases for 88% of US consumers, compared with 78% for price and 56% for healthfulness. Convenience also ranked above healthfulness, at 61%.
Which compromises will shoppers accept?
Millbio wanted to establish whether consumers would enjoy its functional bread as much as a familiar supermarket alternative, and how nutritional messaging would affect their expectations. The research compared bread made with its Panvivo GLP1ve concentrate against a supermarket ‘healthy choice’ brand.
Alessandro Boggiani, cofounder, president and CEO of Millbio, says bread made with the concentrate produced a stronger instinctive first impression than the benchmark. Women and Gen X consumers responded most positively at a sensory level, while testing also identified sensory details the company intends to fine-tune.
“The data also picked up a small number of sensory details that we will fine tune, none of which call for changes to the overall recipe,” he says.
The development opportunity lies in using the findings to decide where an adjustment is worthwhile. If additional fibre changes the crumb or pulse flour introduces an aftertaste, manufacturers need to establish how consumers respond to that difference before deciding whether to reduce the ingredient, rebalance the recipe or accept the change.
Ubiali says taste and textural attributes are the primary drivers of acceptance in functional bakery. However, the description attached to the loaf can also influence how those attributes are received.
“As we anticipated, when many consumers first saw the functional messaging, they expected a lesser eating experience,” says Boggiani. “Gen Z was the exception; they responded more positively to the functional messaging and were not put off by it at all.”
That gives bakers another variable to test. The same nutritional pitch could make younger shoppers eager to try the bread while leaving other consumers expecting a worthy but disappointing mouthful.
“The brain genuinely likes a product better depending on the narrative and presentation around it, even though nothing about the product itself has changed,” says Ubiali.
Comparing the same loaf blind and with its intended packaging would help teams investigate that effect. It could show whether a formulation performs well on its own, whether functional messaging changes the response and which consumer groups welcome the proposition.
“The brain doesn’t process taste in isolation; it processes it in context. Getting the framing of the experience right is just as important as getting the formulation right.”
Can brain responses predict buying behaviour?
The harder test comes when shoppers pay for the loaf, eat it at home and decide whether to buy it again.
“A functional bread that people don’t enjoy won’t be bought a second time,” says Boggiani.
Ubiali says Thimus draws on 10 years of reference data to benchmark new findings and tracks the market performance of products developed using its research. He also points to independent work exploring whether EEG measurements can improve predictions of commercial success.
A 2025 Journal of Marketing Research study analysed five datasets involving 188 participants watching 161 movie trailers. Researchers examined several brain-activity measures and found that gamma-wave activity improved predictions of box-office performance beyond film characteristics and viewers’ stated liking. Its predictive value also extended to movies outside the datasets used to build the model.
The researchers suggested that the gamma response could reflect how viewers understood what they were watching. That gives food researchers something more specific to investigate: whether consumers’ brain responses to a product and its description help explain their subsequent choices.
In bakery, that means connecting the measurements to a decision manufacturers actually face, whether choosing between formulations, adjusting texture or deciding how prominently to present nutritional benefits. Following the resulting products into the market would then help establish how those decisions affect consumer choice and repeat purchasing.
A useful neuroscience study should leave a bakery team knowing more about what to do next. It might identify an aftertaste worth addressing, a texture consumers readily accept or messaging that makes the loaf more appealing. The commercial payoff comes when that understanding helps manufacturers make bread shoppers enjoy eating and want to buy again.
Study:
Boksem MAS, van Diepen RM, Eijlers E, et al. (2025). Do EEG Metrics Derived from Trailers Predict the Commercial Success of Movies? A Systematic Analysis of Five Independent Datasets. Journal of Marketing Research, 62(4), 703-720. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437241309875
