Taste Personas: Customize Your Flavor Profile

Taste personas define how you eat — your budget, vibe, and priorities. Choose a preset, build your own, or let your review history create one for you.

A taste persona is the profile that tells NaijaTaste how you eat. It captures your rating habits, price sensitivity, favourite food vocabulary, and past review style. The platform uses your persona to predict how you would rate a restaurant and to rank recommendations in order of cultural fit. You can pick one of three preset personas in the app, or build your own persona object for API calls.

The three app personas

The homepage lets you pick from three preset personas, each representing a distinct Nigerian eating style.

Lagos Professional

Lagos Professional prioritises quiet, comfortable dining. This persona values ambience and a calm environment over price — they’re happy to spend more as long as the setting is right.

• Looks for: Quiet lunch spots, air conditioning, good service
• Price sensitivity: Low (price is secondary to experience)
• Typical rating tendency: Balanced — satisfied when comfort is met
• Common tone keywords: ambience, AC, quiet, service, professional

Street Food Enthusiast

Street Food Enthusiast chases the real thing. This persona hunts out the best bukas, roadside spots, and holes-in-the-wall where the jollof is smoky and the suya is correct.

• Looks for: Smoky jollof, suya, affordable spots, local bukas
• Price sensitivity: High (cheap and correct is the standard)
• Typical rating tendency: Harsh — standards are high even for cheap spots
• Common tone keywords: jollof, suya, cheap, authentic, buka

The Aunty

The Aunty goes premium. This persona heads to the best restaurants in town for family Sunday lunch — the kind of place that is clean, respectable, and makes a good impression.

• Looks for: Premium restaurants, family-friendly, clean environments
• Price sensitivity: Low (quality and respectability come first)
• Typical rating tendency: Generous — appreciates the effort of a good setting
• Common tone keywords: clean, family, Sunday, respectable, premium

Persona fields for the API

When you call /simulate-review or /recommend directly, you pass a persona object in the request body. Here are all the fields you can include:

Field	Type	Required	Description
user_id	string	No	An optional identifier for this persona. Used to trace and reference personas across requests.
avg_rating	number	No	The persona’s historical average star rating (1–5). Shapes how generous or strict the simulated rating will be.
rating_tendency	string	No	One of harsh (avg ~2.5), balanced (avg ~3.5), or generous (avg ~4.5). Sets the overall rating disposition.
price_sensitivity	string	No	One of high (budget-conscious), medium, or low (price is no object). Influences how price-related features affect the rating.
tone_keywords	array	No	Words that frequently appear in the persona’s reviews (e.g. ["jollof", "service", "portion"]). Guide the vocabulary of the generated review text.
total_reviews	number	No	How many reviews this persona has written. Helps calibrate confidence and specificity in the output.
sample_reviews	array	No	One or more example review texts from this persona. The simulator uses these to match writing style and phrasing.

When using the API directly, you build your own persona object and pass it in the request body. None of these fields are strictly required — the simulator works with whatever subset you provide.

Persona levels for signed-in users

When you sign in and write reviews on NaijaTaste, the platform derives your persona traits automatically from your review history. As you write more reviews, your persona level increases and your profile becomes more accurate.

Level	Reviews needed	Description
Curious Taster	0 reviews	Your starting level. The platform uses general defaults until you build up history.
Flavor Seeker	5+ reviews	Your rating habits and price sensitivity start to take shape.
Taste Connoisseur	10+ reviews	Your tone keywords and writing style are well established. Simulations feel noticeably personalised.
Flavor Oracle	15+ reviews	Full persona fidelity. The simulator mirrors your voice and preferences with high accuracy.