Bringing down barriers to children’s healthy eating: a critical review of opportunities, within a complex food system

This narrative review revises the scientific evidence of recent years on healthy eating in children and adolescents, making sense of promising avenues of action, from a food system perspective. A conceptual framework is provided to better understand how eating habits of children and adolescents are shaped to identify key multisectoral approaches that should be implemented to promote healthier diets. The following influencing factors are discussed: individual factors (physiological and psychological factors, food preferences and food literacy competencies), factors within the personal and socio-cultural food environments, external food environments, and the supply chain. In each section, the main barriers to healthy eating are briefly discussed focusing on how to overcome them. Finally, a discussion with recommendations of actions is provided, anchored in scientific knowledge, and transferable to the general public, industry, and policymakers. We highlight that multidisciplinary approaches are not enough, a systems approach, with a truly holistic view is needed. Apart from introducing systemic changes, a variety of interventions can be implemented at different levels to foster healthier diets in children, through fostering healthier and more sustainable food environments, facilitating pleasurable sensory experiences, increasing their food literacy, and enhancing their agency by empowering them to make better food related decisions. Acknowledging children as unique individuals is required, through interpersonal interactions, as well as their role in their environments. Actions should aim to enable children and adolescents as active participants within sustainable food systems, to support healthier dietary behaviours that can be sustained throughout life, impacting health at a societal level

Identifying important package features of milk desserts using free listing and word association

Identifying the package and label features that are most relevant for consumer might provide useful information for designing a food package that closely matches consumer needs and expectations. In the present work two groups of 100 milk dessert consumers were asked to elicit package and label features of milk desserts using word association and free listing. Both methodologies were useful, efficient and quick methods to determine package and label features most likely to influence consumer perception of milk desserts. Although some differences were found between them, results related to the design of milk dessert packages were similar and suggested that brand, package shape, colour, and the design of the label might be the most relevant features that should be taken into account during package design of this food product. Cluster analysis of participants enabled the identification of groups of consumers that might be driven by different package features when making their purchase decisions of milk desserts

Exploring the common and unique variability in TDS and TCATA data – A comparison using canonical correlation and orthogonalization.

Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) and Temporal Check-all-that-Apply (TCATA) from three different case studies are compared by means of canonical correlation analysis, orthogonalization and principal component analysis of the vertically unfolded data (which means that the matrices compared have samples* timepoints in the rows and attributes in the columns). The multivariate analyses decompose the datasets into common and distinct components. The results showed that the major part of the variation is common between the two methods for the cases investigated, but that there were subtle differences showing better discrimination for TCATA than TDS. TDS showed a more complex data structure and more unique variation. The unique variation in TDS is, however, difficult to interpret. The methods are more different towards the end of the mastication, this can be explained both by the difficulty of assessors to agree on the dominant attributes at the bolus stage for TDS, and that assessors may forget to unclick attributes in TCATA. This work builds on recent methodological studies on temporal methods that aim to better understand differences among methodologies and ultimately to identify what methods could be better for answering different objectives.Exploring the common and unique variability in TDS and TCATA data – A comparison using canonical correlation and orthogonalization.acceptedVersio

Can consumer segmentation in projective mapping contribute to a better understanding of consumer perception?

In projective mapping tasks assessors create an overall representation of the similarities and differences among samples by relying on a process of synthesis for analyzing and processing sensory information. Individual differences in consumers’ information processing and preference patterns could strongly affect which sensory characteristics they consider more relevant for estimating similarities and differences among samples. Therefore, low-dimensional consensus configurations (obtained via MFA or GPA) may not represent the perception of some consumer segments. This could lead to inaccurate conclusions about consumers’ sensory perception of the products or at least to the loss of valuable information about the perception of some consumer groups. In this context, the aims of the present work were to explore consumer segmentation in projective mapping. Datasets from nine studies with 81–102 consumers were analyzed to explore consumers’ segmentation. Through applying hierarchical cluster analysis on consumers’ coordinates in the first four dimensions of the MFA, between 2 and 4 groups of consumers were identified in each study. Sample configurations and consumers’ descriptions strongly differed among the groups, indicating heterogeneity in the relative relevance they gave to the sensory characteristics of the samples for estimating the similarities and differences among samples. In all cases it was observed that the consensus configuration was highly similar to the configuration of one of the groups, which was not necessarily the larger but the one with the highest explained variance by the first dimension of the MFA. These results suggest the need to explore segmentation when analyzing data from projective mapping tasks, and to further study the relationship between consumers’ holistic perception of products and preference patterns.submittedVersio

It is not all about information! Sensory experience overrides the impact of nutrition information on consumers? choice of sugar-reduced drinks.

ISBNPA, 4-7 june, 2019. Ref. 17340 SO04, SO04.2. ISBN 978-1-732401101-2

Consumer expectations and perception of chocolate milk desserts enriched with antioxidants

A study was carried out to identify consumers' previous expectations of chocolate milk desserts enriched with antioxidants and to determine if these expectations affected product perception. Seventy-five consumers participated in the study and were asked to complete a word association task before the evaluation. Then, consumers tried six milk desserts with different polyphenolic concentration, scored their overall liking and willingness to purchase and provided up to four words to describe each of the samples. Cluster analysis performed on consumer-elicited terms in the word association task allowed the identification of three consumer segments with different expectations and motivations toward chocolate milk desserts enriched with antioxidants. These groups also differed in their evaluation of the desserts when tasting them, showing different overall liking, willingness to purchase and sensory description of the samples. This suggests that consumers' prior expectations and motivations significantly affected their response when tasting the desserts. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Word association was used to get an insight on consumer expectations of chocolate milk desserts enriched with antioxidants, proving to be a useful methodology. This approach could be a simple technique to understand consumer expectations before tasting a product, and to study how these expectations affect their response after tasting the product, particularly interesting when novel products are considered. Consumer segmentation based on their previous thoughts about a product could help to assure that a product meets consumer expectations appropriately, leading to a higher satisfaction

Consumer-Driven product design

Both consumer researchers and product designers recognize the importance of good design for the success of products and brands. Consumer researchers are focused on understanding consumer responses to product design. Designers try to adjust products to consumers' needs and enhance product experience by involving consumers in the design process. The complexity of consumer responses to products has prompted both consumer and design researchers to formulate conceptual models of consumer responses to product design. This chapter will give an overview of four different perspectives that are used to describe consumer responses to product design, including the designers' perspective centered on product esthetics, the consumer perspective revolving around product experience, the semiotics perspective on symbolic product meaning, and the managerial perspective stressing consumer satisfaction as most important

Assessment of global and individual reproducibility of projective mapping with consumers

The popularity of projective mapping with consumers for sensory characterization has markedly increased in the last 5 years. To have confidence in this methodology,it is necessary to ensure that a similar product profile would emerge if the test was repeated. Also, deciding whether the study should be replicated or not is a key issue in test implementation. In this context, the aim of the present work was to evaluate global and individual reproducibility of projective mapping for sensory characterization with consumers and to evaluate the influence of the size of difference among samples. Six consumer studies were conducted using a test–retest paradigm. In each study, responses from the same group of consumers to the same sample set in two different sessions were compared. Across the six studies, individual reproducibility tended to be low. However, the RV coefficients of consensus sample configurations between sessions were higher than 0.75, suggesting that test–retest reproducibility of projective mapping with consumers proved to be relatively high.submittedVersio

Application of a check-all-that-apply question to the development of chocolate milk desserts

Check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions could be a simple alternative to get an insight on consumer perception of a food product. In the present work, CATA questions were used in the development of chocolate milk desserts. Nine chocolate milk desserts were formulated with different sugar and cacao concentration. A consumer study was performed with 70 people, who were asked to score their overall liking and to answer a CATA question that included 18 sensory and hedonic terms. Besides, the samples were evaluated by a trained assessors' panel. Highly significant differences were found in the frequencies in which CATA terms were used for describing the nine desserts, suggesting that this methodology was able to detect differences in consumer perception of the desserts. Sample configuration from consumers' CATA counts and trained assessors data were similar, suggesting a good agreement between both evaluations. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS The use of a CATA question resulted in a simple and valid approach to gather information about consumers' perception of the product, including both their sensory and hedonic impression. This methodology enabled the direct identification of drivers of liking for groups of consumers with different preference patterns. Considering results from the present study, the use of CATA questions could be an interesting methodology to obtain a sensory map based only on consumer perception of the products and to perform external preference mapping when a sensory trained panel is not available