Pounded yam is a glutinous dough prepared by peeling, boiling, pounding, and kneading yam tubers. it is a popular food in Nigeria. This study reports end user preferences for pounded yam and implications for trait evaluation by breeding programme. Study was carried out in two pounded yam consuming regions in Nigeria: South East and South West. Multistage sampling technique was used to collect information from users along food chain. This was done using the RTBfoods manual that was developed from Work Package 1 team of the RTBfoods (Breeding Root, Tuber and Banana for consumers’ preferences) project. This involved market, individual, key informant interviews and focus group discussions.

The mean age of the respondents was 50 years. In the SE majority of respondents were males (80%), while most of the respondents in the SW were females.

Farmers’ interview showed that they have a local method of measuring their yam production quantity. In SE, it is measured in terms of ‘chains’, where 25 chains is equivalent to one hectare while in SW it is measured by number of heaps. Most of the farmer  respondents in both regions are small scale farmers.

 Key user-preferred quality traits for pounded yam in both regions were colour and textural quality followed by taste and aroma.

 In the SW the preference of the key preferred quality attributes was in order: textural quality>colour>taste>aroma. The textural attributes were ranked in the following order of preference: stretchability> mouldability> stickiness> smoothness > moderately hard/soft.

 In the SE, colour/appearance was ranked first, followed by textural quality. However, the ranking of the textural quality attributes was in the same order in both regions, thus  there were regional differences in the ranking of these quality attributes. It was observed that food culture plays a dominant role in the ranking of these food quality preferences in both regions.

Hence, from this study, the key user-preferred quality traits for pounded yam are appearance and textural quality followed by taste and aroma.

This information will be useful in determining food quality indicators  and high throughput screening methods that can be used to select breeding lines for preferred quality traits in pounded yam which is the one of the main  objectives of RTBfoods project.