ReviewNovel techniques to understand consumer responses towards food products: A review with a focus on meat
Introduction
Consumer evaluation has been used extensively over the past decades to evaluate the acceptability and quality of food products including meat. Affective tests are used to evaluate consumer liking and preferences of food products. However, these methods rely on measuring the conscious responses of consumers and have been often shown to be a poor predictor of purchase behaviour (Torrico et al., 2018). Furthermore, in meat and meat products, the high variability of the samples is another complex problem that affects the sensory assessment of consumers. In the present review article, the following subjects are described: traditional consumer methods (preference and acceptability), techniques available to understand what sensory properties consumers like and dislike in a product, physiological and psychological factors that can produce biases in consumer testing, qualitative measurements to assess consumer preferences, past and current methods used for evaluating the sensory characteristics of meat products, the development of the Meat Standard Australia (MSA) protocol to assess the sensory properties of meat, psychological factors (emotions and motives) that affect consumers when assessing food products, current novel sensory techniques that use physiological responses (biometrics) of consumers to assess food acceptability, and a final example using biometric measurements of consumers toward beef samples.
Section snippets
Traditional consumer testing of food products
Consumer testing of food products is generally undertaken for two major purposes: (1) To understand what a consumer thinks about the acceptability of a product (i.e., liking and preference), and (2) To understand purchase intent (willingness to buy, willingness to pay). Often, it also is important to draw links between the sensory profile and consumer data, so the food producer can understand which characteristics of their product are desired or not by consumers. Consumer evaluation plays an
Industry approach to consumers
Traditionally, the food and meat industry has relied heavily on quantitative assessment of consumer-based responses for evaluating quality, with most using tasting panels and hedonic scale assessment of products. In this scenario, consumers are asked to rate the sensory properties including colour, aroma, taste, flavour, tenderness, and juiciness using 6- to 9-point intensity scales, 3- to 5-point JAR scales, and liking (visual appearance, aroma, taste, flavour, tenderness, juiciness, and
Meat – a unique sensory product
Sensory assessment of meat and meat products varies widely in different countries and even different research groups within a country. Meat and meat products are amongst the least homogeneous foods in terms of intrinsic composition and characteristics, leading to significant variability in sensory attributes and thus method development and adaptation required to assess the overall acceptability. This part of the review is not an exhaustive overview of factors affecting meat eating qualities. It
Emotions affecting consumers
Sensory evaluation depends on the use of acceptance (liking) measurements to understand and predict consumer preferences and food choices (de Graaf et al., 2005). However, the continuous market failure of newly launched products (assessed using liking parameters) provides a strong evidence that there is more to food choice than sensory acceptability (Gutjar et al., 2015; King & Meiselman, 2010). Human eating behaviour may not only be affected by the sensory properties of foods but also by the
Conclusions
Traditional techniques in consumer testing are used to measure preference, acceptability, and quality of food and meat products. Additional consumer based methods such check-all-that-apply (CATA), temporal dominance of sensation (TDS), and just about right scales (JAR) can be used to provide more information to link consumers responses to sensory properties. However, quantitative methods have the disadvantage that the capturing of consumer feelings and responses is very limited. Qualitative
Acknowledgments
This research was funded partially by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. IH120100053 “Unlocking the Food Value Chain: Australian industry transformation for ASEAN markets”. http://www.arc.gov.au/acknowledging-arc
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