Consumers’ sensory perception homogeneity and liking of chocolate

Abstract

Sensory evaluation is performed through the human senses. And subjectivity and diversity of their responses are inevitably included. Confirming consumer agreement is important when drawing conclusions from a limited number of participants. Consumers were divided into clusters according to their consumption frequency, liking score, and sensory perception using the CATA questionnaire. The homogeneity of CATA responses was analyzed for each cluster, and the similarity of samples/attribute configuration between groups was also determined. The homogeneity index showed a slight increase in all clusters except light user and K + 1 clusters. RV-coefficient for sample configurations were high, however, it was relatively lower value for attribute configuration. This study suggests that although the difference value was not large, slight differences may appear in the results depending on the segmentation criteria even when using the same data.