Consumer evaluations of commercially available plant-based cheddar cheese alternatives reveal inferior taste, nutrition and emotional appeal.

Many people in the Western world wish to reduce dietary reliance on animal-based and animal-derived foods. Plant-based (PB) meat and dairy alternatives can aid in this transition, but in the dairy category, only the milk market is well developed. Attention in the present research is, therefore, directed to PB cheese alternatives (PBCA), which were studied relative to dairy cheeses in a consumer taste test (central location setting) with 157 New Zealand (NZ) consumers conducted in 2023.

Plant-Based Alternatives Need Not Be Inferior: Findings from a Sensory and Consumer Research Case Study with Cream Cheese.

Reliance on animal foods must be reduced to improve planetary and human well-being. This research studied plant-based cheese alternatives (PBCA) relative to dairy cheese in a consumer taste test with 157 consumers in New Zealand. A case study approach used cream cheese (commercially available) as the focal product category (2 PBCA, 2 dairy) and implemented a multi-response paradigm (hedonic, sensory, emotional, conceptual, situational).

Importance of food choice motives vary with degree of food neophobia.

Food Neophobia (FN) is a stable trait that measures individuals' propensity to avoid novel/unfamiliar foods. In this research, focus was directed to covariation between FN and food choice factors as measured using two variants of the food choice questionnaire (FCQ). To our knowledge, there are no previous studies which investigates these associations in detail, and in this regard the present research advances understanding of individual differences in FN and FCQ.

Multi-response approaches in product-focused investigations: Methodological variations across three case studies.

Consumers' product experiences are increasingly uncovered using approaches that extend beyond acceptability and sensory perception. The present research is situated in this context and adopts a multi-response approach to jointly obtain attitudinal, conceptual, emotional, situational and/or sensorial evaluations. With the aim of greater methodological understanding, three case studies were conducted with samples in three product categories (fruit- and vegetable-based beverages (n = 10), seafood (n = 6) and chocolate (n = 7)) using consumers from New Zealand (n = 196), India (living in New Zealand) (n = 138) and China (n = 167), conducted in central location (CLT) or home-use test (HUT) settings.

Minimal effect of evoked contexts in product testing with consumers: Case studies using typical consumption situations.

Consumer studies conducted under central location test (CLT) conditions continue to be dominant in product research and context evocation have been suggested as an avenue to partly mitigate the lack of real consumption settings. In this research the influence of evoked context on product acceptability was investigated in eight diverse consumer studies (138-268 participants per study) through the use of between-subjects designs that allowed the comparison of hedonic scores obtained with and without evoked context. In a departure from previous research, consumers mentally evoked their typical consumption contexts for the focal product categories and content analysis of descriptions of these situations showed them to often be idiosyncratic.

Valence, arousal and sentiment meanings of 33 facial emoji: Insights for the use of emoji in consumer research.

Emoji are increasingly used for emotional expression in computer-mediated communications and represent a relevant source of information for consumer companies about consumer's food-related attitudes and behaviours. However, given that emoji convey a wide range of meanings an in-depth understanding of how consumers interpret them is necessary to enable their use in food-related consumer research. The purpose of this research was to explore consumers' interpretations of facial emoji.

Measuring consumers' product associations with emoji and emotion word questionnaires: case studies with tasted foods and written stimuli.

Measurement of emotional associations to food/beverage stimuli and consumption situations provide consumer insights that extend beyond hedonic responses. The aim of this research was to compare emoji, a novel approach in product-focused emotion research, with emotion words, an established approach. Focus was directed to questionnaires, which are popular in this field of research.