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As enjoyment is a driver of food purchase and consumption, consumer evaluation of products should be the focal point for development and improvement.

Measuring liking for a set of products using selected consumers allows an understanding of the influence of sensory properties on acceptance and preference for those products. As well as measuring consumer responses to product features or flavours, we can also look at the effects of the context of consumption on these responses.

Consumer market research can be used by manufacturers of food and beverages, ingredient suppliers, retailers or service providers.

Benefits of Consumer Testing

• Manage risk by achieving informed decision making
• Enter new markets, or maximise potential in existing markets
• Gain a competitive edge (i.e. superior quality product, brand loyalty, reduced costs of product formulations and processing methods while maintaining product superiority, customer satisfaction (especially as consumer tastes change over time)

Uses of Consumer Testing

• Identify what directly influences consumer liking
• Confirm if taste differences are noticed between products, techniques or recipes
• Collect information about how much consumers are willing to pay for products
• Compare location and environment where purchase decisions are made
• Substantiate advertising and label claims

Consumer testing is carried out using untrained individuals, who like and use the product group in question. A simple consumer testing method is to recruit a relatively large group of consumers from the community based on demographic and food consumption criteria. Once in our sensory facility, products are rated for degree of liking under controlled conditions.

SARDI’s Food Innovation and Value Chain conduct consumer sensory programs that are tailored to client needs. They include recruitment of consumers, group discussions, designing surveys to explore attitudes and preferences, and in-house support to understand and implement the results of market testing.

Case Study — Dip

Objective

To provide a comparison of 3 dip recipe variations for their overall liking and generate independent and unbiased data to support the client’s decision making concerning product development.

Method

We qualified and recruited 85 consumers to rate the 3 dips at our sensory facility over 2 sessions. Acceptance testing was performed to determine how much each dip was liked. This was based on a common overall liking scale of all sensory features of the products.

How much do you like sample 833 overall?

Follow up questions related to reasons for liking, along with gender and age information. Suggestions were provided for reasons for liking or disliking depending on how each consumer responded on the overall liking scale below:

Each consumer tasted 3 dips and entered data directly into a computer to enable efficient data collection and analysis. Dips were served with a few crackers and in a randomised order so that dips were given an equal chance of being presented first.

Note: All figures are for demonstration purposes.

Results

From the average overall liking scores we can see that Dip C was preferred and Dip B was least preferred.

Suggested reasons for liking Dip C were mostly due to the ‘great taste’ and a ‘nice texture’ followed by ‘appealing looks’.

The client was able to focus their dip recipe formulation based on what was most preferred by the majority of the consumers in this trial to ensure the success of their product in a competitive marketplace.

Contact:

Andrew Barber
Principal Scientist
E-mail: andrew.barber@sa.gov.au
Phone: +61 8 8303 9342 / 0407 793 872
Sensory Facility: Wine Innovation West Building, Hartley Grove, Urrbrae, South Australia 5064