A comparison of sensory attribute use by children and experts to evaluate chocolate

摘要

Children constitute a complex but interesting market for the food industry. The objective was to compare the sensory attributes generated and rated by a panel of 261 children from 9 to 11 years old with those of a trained panel of 10 adult experts in the food industry, using a range of eight chocolate products belonging to the child segment. In a first phase, a subgroup of 27 children went through attribute generation according,to the Kelly-grid method to establish a questionnaire of 13 attributes. The experts used the QDA method to set up a questionnaire of 27 attributes. Data were analysed to find out relationships between attributes, using Partial Least Square regression with experts' attributes as explicative variables and children's attributes as variables to be explained. Surprisingly, some of the attributes most cited by children are not those better explained by experts' attributes.