The Sensory Anticipation Model: How Visual Design Cues Shape Pre-Taste Expectation in Designer Dessert Design

This working paper introduces and develops the Sensory Anticipation Model (SAM), a practitioner-research framework articulating how consumers form expectations about flavor, perceived quality, and emotional satisfaction from a dessert's visual presentation prior to tasting, and how those pre-taste expectations subsequently govern selection, recall, and willingness to pay.

Findings derive from twelve months of sustained practitioner observation (October 2023 – October 2024) at Christian Fashion Cafe, a concept-driven pastry establishment founded by the author and operated across two locations in Yerevan, Armenia between August 2023 and January 2025. The observational base comprises approximately 50,000 customer encounters across 25 distinct designer-pastry compositions (15 reaching commercial release; approximately four prototype iterations per final design). Data were triangulated across point-of-sale records, structured staff debriefs and a daily customer comment log, third-party online reviews on TripAdvisor, Yandex, and Google, and photographic documentation cross-referenced with publicly shared customer Instagram posts.

The paper identifies five distinct cognitive layers in the pre-taste decision sequence (emotional association, form, color, surface texture, and detail), develops a color–flavor alignment principle grounded in expectancy-disconfirmation theory, and articulates the "known within the unknown" construct as an applied formulation of optimal-novelty findings. SAM is offered as theory-generative and invites controlled experimental validation in adjacent settings.

Empirical work conducted October 2023 – October 2024 at Christian Fashion Cafe, Yerevan, Armenia. Formal preprint published 2026.