An itinerant sensory approach to investigate consumers' perception and acceptability at a food exhibition

In a food exhibition where several producers of the same product category are present at the same time, consumers usually have the opportunity to taste several free samples of the same product type, thus they can experience and compare the sensory characteristics of each and evaluate their liking for each sample tasted. This study assessed the potential of an itinerant sensory data collection in understanding the consumers' perception and acceptance of cheese during a multiple tasting experience at a food exhibition. Subjects tasted seven samples of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese aged for different times (24 and 36 months) at seven producer stands and recorded their evaluations using tablets, on which an application specifically developed for this study was installed. This evaluation situation was defined as “pseudo-natural,” in opposition to the “natural” and the “naturalistic” settings. The itinerant sensory session comprised a liking test, a rate-all-that-apply (RATA) test using a just about right (JAR) scale, a food pairing test, and a questionnaire. Consumers significantly (p b 0.05) discriminated the cheeses as a function of the aging time, describing with different attributes the 24 months (sweetness, fresh fruit, grass, yogurt, butter flavors, elasticity, and humidity) and the 36 months (saltiness, bitterness, sourness, spicy, aromatic herbs, cheese rind flavors, crumbliness, ranularity, hardness, and hotness) aged products. The combined application of regression models, Penalty-Lift analysis, and decision tree models in investigating the relationships between liking and the RATA data, provided results revealing that the attributes elasticity, sweetness, humidity, fresh fruit, and butter were the main drivers of liking. Whereas, the attributes sourness, bitterness, and hardness were the main drivers of dislike. Therefore, even though no significant differences in terms of liking were observed among the tested cheeses, consumers preferred the attributes more frequently perceived in the least aged products. In conclusion, the presented itinerant sensory approach had provided meaningful information to understand the consumers' cheese perception and acceptability. In the future, it could advantageously be applied for studying food perception in other situations in which subjects naturally choose or consume several products while freely moving from one to another (e.g. self-service restaurant).