There is a difference between a product people enjoy once and one they cannot stop buying. The neuroscience behind that gap changes how you develop flavour.
Good taste is not enough: the science of repeat purchase
The initial launch went well. The product is being tried. The reviews are positive overall, and your team tastes it regularly without anyone raising a concern. And yet your repeat purchase rate is sitting well below where it needs to be.
So you start looking elsewhere for the answer. Maybe the packaging needs work. Maybe the price point is slightly off. Maybe the marketing is not reaching the right audience. Because if the taste is fine, the problem must live somewhere else.
This is the assumption I want to challenge directly. The belief that good taste automatically leads to repeat purchase is one that quietly costs food and drink founders a significant amount of money, and it almost never gets questioned out loud. It is also, in my experience, one of the most common places where a product that should be working simply is not.
I work on this kind of challenge regularly with established food and drink brands, and the conversation always starts in the same place: what does your consumer actually experience when they taste your product, and does it make them want to come back?
"That's good" and "I want that again" are genuinely different reactions
The first time a consumer tries your product, there are two distinct reactions they can have. The first is: that is good. The second is: I want to have that again.
These are not the same reaction, and understanding the gap between them changes everything about how you think about flavour development.
"That is good" gets you the first purchase. It is what happens when someone picks your product off the shelf, tries it, and enjoys it in the moment. "I want that again" is the reaction that builds a repeat purchase rate. That is the one that sustains a listing. And a food or drink product can genuinely taste good and still completely fail to trigger it.
Good and crave-able are two different things. Once you understand that distinction, the way you evaluate your own product shifts entirely.
What the neuroscience actually tells us
This is not a theory or a marketing framework. There is real scientific research behind why people return to some products and not others.
Two neuroscientists, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson, spent years studying how the brain responds to pleasurable experiences, including food and drink. Their key finding was that the brain operates two entirely separate systems. The first is liking: the genuine pleasure experienced in the moment of tasting something. The second is wanting: the dopamine-driven motivation to seek that experience again. That pull you feel when you are standing in a supermarket aisle and your hand goes to a specific product almost without thinking.
The critical insight from their work is that these two systems operate independently. A product can trigger real pleasure in the moment without ever activating the pull to return.
Then there is the work of Robert Zajonc on what he called the mere exposure effect: the more familiar we become with something, the more we tend to like it. But there is an important nuance here when it comes to repeat purchase. This only holds when the experience is consistent. If your product tastes slightly different from one batch to the next, that positive memory does not consolidate. The wanting weakens. And the repeat purchase quietly falls away.
There is also olfactory memory to consider. When you eat or drink something, the aroma compounds connect with olfactory receptors that have a direct neurological pathway to the amygdala and hippocampus, the regions of the brain responsible for memory and emotion. This is why a particular smell can place you instantly back inside a specific moment from years ago. For food and drink products, it means that flavour is not only a sensory experience. It becomes a memory. An emotion. A positive, distinctive, satisfying flavour gets stored, and it draws people back towards it.
A flat or inconsistent experience does not get filed in the same way. It does not create that pull. And that is the neuroscience of repeat purchase.
The three things that silently erode repeat purchase
Once you understand the bar that actually matters, you start recognising the specific places things go wrong. There are three issues at the taste level that quietly destroy repeat purchase rate, and most founders do not spot them until the damage is already done.
Consistency drift
Your product enters manufacturing, volumes scale up, and small variations begin to creep in. A slightly different processing temperature, a raw material batch from a new supplier, a minor change in equipment. Each individual shift is small enough that nobody on your team notices, because they have been tasting the product constantly and their palate has adapted around the change. But a consumer returning for their second purchase will feel something is off. They may not be able to articulate exactly what is different. They just know it does not quite match the experience they remembered.
I have this with products I used to genuinely love. Nutella, Bounty, Lindt. I watched the quality change gradually over time, felt it in each purchase, and eventually stopped buying without ever making a conscious decision to do so. The experience simply did not match what I had stored. That quiet shift in perception is exactly what puts your repeat purchase rate down without ever generating a clear explanation.
The good on paper problem
The product hits every brief. Clean label, strong health claims, high in protein. When you taste it, nothing is technically wrong. But there is no moment that makes the brain say: I want that again. This is precisely where the liking versus wanting distinction matters in practice. A product can satisfy intellectually and still fail to satisfy sensorially. Health claims drive trial. Flavour drives return.
The functional ingredient problem
Plant proteins, marine collagen, adaptogens, botanicals. Some of these bring their own strong and persistent notes to every serving. Earthy, bitter, fishy, cardboardy. When those notes are not properly addressed during the flavour development process, they sit in the background of every single experience and quietly put consumers off. Someone may try your product once, drawn in by the health claim or the concept. If there is something they cannot quite place, something that just feels slightly wrong, they will not come back. And they will rarely explain why.
If you are developing a new product and you are not yet confident which flavour direction will work with your specific base, the Choose Package is designed for exactly this: understanding your base, running the trials, and finding the direction that gives your target consumer a genuine reason to come back.
How to actually diagnose where things stand
If any of this is landing, here is how I would approach the diagnosis.
Start with fresh tasters. Not your team, not your co-founders, not anyone who has been sampling the product for months. Your actual target consumers, people who have never encountered it before. Watch their reaction carefully. There is a real and visible difference between "hmm, that is nice" and "oh, that is really good, what is this?" That difference is telling you something important about whether you have triggered wanting, not just liking.
Then look closely at two very specific groups: the people who bought your product once and did not return, and the people who kept buying. Talk to both. Ask the people who left what they liked, what they did not, and specifically whether any of it related to taste or texture or smell. Ask the people who stayed what keeps pulling them back. The gap between those two sets of answers is almost certainly where your repeat purchase challenge sits.
The next step is to benchmark. Find a product with a genuinely loyal following and taste it alongside yours. It does not have to be a direct competitor. The point is to understand what that flavour experience delivers that yours does not yet. That comparison often reveals more than months of internal feedback rounds.
And finally, read your reviews carefully. Every one or two star review that mentions taste, texture, smell, or anything sensory is a data point. If one person says it, that is context. If several people say something similar, that is a signal. They are trying to tell you something, just not always in the language of flavour science.
Good is not the goal. Craveable is.
The gap between a product that gets tried and a product that gets bought again comes down to one thing. The taste experience has to trigger not just liking, but wanting.
Consistency drift, a flavour that performs without satisfying, functional notes that were never properly addressed in development: these are all solvable problems. But you have to know which one you are actually dealing with, and the only way to find that out is to go directly to your target consumers and be genuinely honest about what they tell you.
If you are building a new product and you want to make sure the flavour direction is right from the very beginning, especially if you are working with a challenging functional base, the Choose Package is where we do that work together. It is not about selecting a flavour from a list. It is about understanding your specific base and finding the direction that will make your consumers want to come back.
Book a free discovery call here if you would like to talk it through first.
