Short CommunicationImplementing immersive technologies in consumer testing: Liking and Just-About-Right ratings in a laboratory, immersive simulated café and real café
Introduction
In traditional central location tests, participants evaluate products in isolated sensory booths where everything is as standardized as possible (i.e., temperature, light conditions, sound etc.) and non-product contextual information is intentionally minimized. This is completely different from real-life situations in which you drink or eat a product in different contexts (e.g., at home or work, in a café or restaurant) together with other people (e.g., with family, friends and colleagues). Although sensory booths enable a strict control over product testing, they may not be representative of what happens in the real world as they do not take into consideration the role of context in shaping product perceptions and acceptance (Galiňanes Plaza, Delarue, & Saulais, 2019).
A solution would be to simulate the real-life context in the laboratory via the use of immersive technologies. i.e., re-creating the physical context of a consumption situation in a laboratory with visual, auditory and olfactory cues. Initial research indicates that incorporating immersive technologies into sensory and consumer testing may improve the predictive validity and reliability of liking scores (Bangcuyo et al., 2015, Delarue et al., 2019, Hathaway and Simons, 2017, Sinesio et al., 2018). However, little is known how immersive technologies impact optimal levels of sensory attributes (JAR ratings) of products. The aim of the present study was therefore to measure JAR ratings next to liking in a laboratory context, an immersive simulated context and a real-life context.
Section snippets
Participants
In total, 54 Dutch participants were recruited to participate in three taste sessions from the Wageningen Food & Biobased Research database according to the following selection criteria: 1) 18–60 years of age, 2) consuming tomato soup at least once a month, and 3) healthy (self-reported). Of the 54 recruited participants, nine participants were excluded from the study as they did not show up (eight participants) or dropped out after the first taste session (one participant). This resulted in a
Results
Visual assessment of the Q-Q plots and residual plots indicated that normality and homogeneity of variance assumptions were met. As we observed no statistically significant differences for Gender, Day of week and Timeslot (p > 0.05), we report only the means of the experimental groups for all analyses.
Discussion
This study investigated taste perception and liking of tomato soups in a laboratory context, an immersive simulated café and a real café. To our surprise, we observed no significant differences in liking and JAR ratings for the soups between the three contexts. Nevertheless, participants felt most engaged in the real café and immersive simulated café, and least in the laboratory.
Overall, we can conclude that the more realistic scenarios (i.e., real café and immersive simulated café) increased
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant from the Dutch Top Consortium for Knowledge and Innovation (TKI) Agri&Food together with Unilever R&D Vlaardingen, Kikkoman Europe R&D Laboratory and Noldus Information Technology (TKI-AF-17005). We would like to thank Manouk van Zoggel for helping in the data collection, Saskia Meijboom for her help with the recruitment of subjects and João Paulo for her statistical advice.
Conflict of interest
E.H.Z. is an employee of Unilever Innovation Centre Wageningen, The Netherlands, which markets food, home and personal care products. D. Kaneko is an employee of Kikkoman Europe R&D Laboratory Wageningen, The Netherlands, which is a major supplier of naturally brewed soy sauce products.
Author statement
E.H.Z. was responsible for the design and manuscript. E.V. carried out the study and was involved in the data analyses and manuscript writing. R.A.W. contributed to the design, data analyses and manuscript writing. D.K and G.B.D. were involved in the design and earlier drafts of the manuscript.
References (20)
- et al.
The use of immersive technologies to improve consumer testing: The role of ecological validity, context and engagement in evaluating coffee
Food Quality and Preference
(2015) - et al.
Dimensions of everyday eating and drinking episodes
Appetite
(2007) - et al.
Taking control of product testing context thanks to a multi-sensory immersive room. A case study on alcohol-free beer
Food Quality and Preference
(2019) - et al.
The persuit of ecological validity through contextual methodologies
Food Quality & Preference
(2019) - et al.
Does environment matter? Assessments of wine in traditional booths compared to an immersive and actual wine bar
Food Quality and Preference
(2019) - et al.
The impact of multiple immersion levels on data quality and panelist engagement for the evaluation of cookies under a preparation-based scenario
Food Quality and Preference
(2017) - et al.
Inducing context with immersive technologies in sensory consumer testing
- et al.
Using immersive technologies to explore the effects of congruent and incongruent contextual cues on context recall, product evaluation time, and preference and liking during consumer hedonic testing
Food Research International
(2019) - et al.
Sequential design of sensory trials
Food Quality and Preference
(1995) - et al.
Capturing consumer perception of vegetable freshness in a simulated reallife taste situation
Food Research International
(2018)
Cited by (26)
Congruency of an eating environment influences product liking: A virtual reality study
2024, Food Quality and PreferenceThe impact of personally relevant consumption contexts during product evaluations in virtual reality
2023, Food Quality and PreferenceNext-generation sensory and consumer science: data collection tools using digital technologies
2023, Digital Sensory Science: Applications in New Product DevelopmentMultisensory immersive rooms: a mixed reality solution to overcome the limits of contexts studies
2023, Digital Sensory Science: Applications in New Product DevelopmentAdded value of implicit measures in sensory and consumer science
2023, Digital Sensory Science: Applications in New Product DevelopmentCharacterisation of Korean rice wine (makgeolli) prepared by different processing methods
2023, Current Research in Food ScienceCitation Excerpt :Researchers in this field of sensory science have noted that there is a variability of overall liking for food products being assessed at home (home use test) compared to the laboratory (central location test). However, other researchers have also noted that non-laboratory settings increased the encouragement of participants when sensory experiments are being conducted (Zandstra et al., 2020). Although this current research design was limited to observing the participants' behaviour in non-laboratory settings, this study may give researchers, such as in the wine industry, and brewing industries, insight into how New Zealand consumers are likely to perceive makgeolli in the natural environment.