An investigation of consumer methodologies for hedonic testing and sensory profiling.

摘要

This dissertation aims to provide new viewpoints on understanding hedonic responses in the context of a product's sensory space, based on consumers' perspectives. This research specifically illustrates three important considerations, including what data collection approach should be utilized for collecting sensory information, whether underlying hedonic judgment would influence the sensory information collected directly from the consumers, and whether over-thinking would occur when liking judgment is collected through positional relative rating. Fruit juice blends, for an aqueous food system, and cereal/granola bars, for a solid food system, were used in this research.;The first part investigated whether a holistic way of collecting sensory information, with the use of projective mapping, would better link to consumers' hedonic judgment, which is an integrated measurement, compared to an analytical data collection approach. Although the hypothesis could not be demonstrated, the study found that projective mapping allowed less complex polynomial modeling for consumers' preferences in the tested food systems.The second part focused on validating the argument of whether hedonic judgment is involved when sensory information is collected directly from consumers, a practice which is becoming more and more common among researchers, through the use of alternative descriptive analysis tool, projective mapping. The results suggested that consumers may possibly have been influenced by their hedonic judgment when they were asked to perform a projective mapping based on the product's sensory (dis)similarities. The last topic investigated one of the hedonic data collection procedures, positional relative rating (aka rank-rating), focusing on whether positional relative rating may be prone to over-thinking on the part of the consumer, arising from the multiple tastings and re-tastings of the stimuli, and on a larger sample set for its application. There was an implication that the over-thinking was unlikely to occur or the influence of over-thinking would be minimal in affecting the eventual preference rating of the products.