Résumé
African consumers' expectations concerning quality of food products are great. In spite of<br />constrained budgets, we showed that market retailed prices revealed quality preferences of the<br />consumers and not only production costs. In very poor countries like Mali, food innovation is<br />limited by the very low purchasing power of the population. However, technological food product<br />or process innovations are possible and sometimes valuable. Demand driven innovation may lead to<br />open new markets, opportunities for small and medium scale enterprises and to improve consumers'<br />welfare. Based on this assumption, technical research was done to provide new food products. In<br />this paper, using both sensory test and a hedonic price approach, we estimated consumer demand<br />for different characteristics of fonio, a West African cereal, and showed that poor consumers do<br />have quality requirements and actually pay for it. We showed that the shadow or hedonic price paid<br />for quality characteristics is small but significant. A comparison of sensory test and market study<br />showed a convergence between what people say they prefer and what they really pay for. Results<br />were consistent and showed directions for technological improvement of the product and its<br />production process. The Partial Least Square method was used to estimate hedonic prices of the<br />different modalities of fonio quality traits. This method was interesting since it solved the Ordinary<br />Least Square method's colinearity problems.