Connecting flavors in social media: A cross cultural study with beer pairing

Culture is an important driver of food preferences and largely determines exposure to ingredients combinations. The cultural variety in culinary practices across countries raises the question of how flavor combinations are built and how they transcend individual differences in consumers' preferences. For example, in Latin America, despite having similar cultures and language, the diversity in culinary practices leads to different flavor combinations across nations. Therefore, we hypothesize that each country will show different preferences in flavor combinations that could be understood by social media exploration as an innovative approach. One study was conducted exploring social media in four countries (Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico) on a one-year basis, using a list of fifty-seven keywords associated with beer flavors. In a first analysis, the list of mentions from consumers was categorized in frequencies of flavors per country and analyzed using correspondence analysis (CA) and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC). Results showed that the countries could be clustered in three groups. Cluster 1 with Mexico and Peru, and the rest of the countries in different clusters. The co-occurrence of paired flavors in social media was used to build a similarity matrix that was analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) in order to find a pattern of pairing per country. The obtained map was useful to understand the cultural differences in flavor paring per country. Overall, the analysis of flavor pairing through social media was an effective technique to access the structure of flavor pairing for beer in different countries.