Monthly Archives: August 2015

Highlights of Pangborn 2015

Pangborn 2015The international sensory symposium of the year, Pangborn 2015 has come to an end, leaving sensory and consumer researchers with a lot to think about.  I just wanted to share the highlights and three key themes of the conference here to get us all thinking about what the next two years may hold in product-based research.

 

Global research – The whole world is conducting sensory and consumer science, and Pangborn 2015 really opened up the world to all the possible insights, from Australia to China, from the US to Thailand.  Delegates learnt about the opportunities and challenges working across international markets and languages.

Speedy sensory – Rapid techniques in product evaluation, such as Mapping, Sorting and Check-All-That Apply (CATA) were put under the microscope at Pangborn, both for general research, and for assessments with specific target consumers.  As expected all rapid methods offer a trade off between speed, efficiency and the level of detail achieved.  As presented by Tracey Hollowood, and something I’ve personally embraced in my own publications, are the opportunities offered by hierarchical sorting approaches to gain fantastic sensory differences and product insight efficiently, while offering the closest option to profiling.  I’d be happy to share my thoughts and ideas on this as well as my paper for anyone interested!

Controlled context – Sensory scientists are always seeking to control all factors of product assessment, from sample preparation and presentation to the surrounding environment and even lighting. However, more consumer researchers are interested in assessing products within the context of where and when they would typically be used.   This is particularly interesting for consumer Central Location Testing (CLT) to determine whether a product fits the context and environment that it would usually be used in.  Therefore finding the ideal trade off between controlled, strict and accurate product testing, to more ‘in-the-moment’ assessments in context is still heavily under debate.

As expected, Pangborn 2015 was a fantastic mix of current research developments, intriguing novel applications for testing techniques as well as branching into newer unchartered territories of mobile apps, global consumer understanding and more implicit methodologies.

Pangborn Banner 2

11th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium, Gothenburg, Sweden

Sunday is the start of Pangborn 2015, a key conference in the diary of Sensory Scientists across the world!  This year the Swedish Institute of Food and Biotechnology are hosting the five day event, bringing together sensory and consumer researchers, businesses and academic institutes from across the globe.

I’m very excited to be attending a few days of Pangborn this year, as the 2015 conference is focussing on a wide range of topic areas from fundamental sensory research to more broad scoping global approaches.  The cross-cultural context is particularly interesting as more and more global businesses are looking to develop products for different consumers and markets.  When I’m not on the MMR stand, I look forward to learning from speakers and poster presentations across a wide range of fields, although some have particularly piqued my interest.  I’m fascinated by sensory-driven product design to make better products for consumers, as well as learning about current innovations and advances in sensory and consumer methodologies to develop the best ways to test products, and this can help us all learn new and interesting approaches.

I’m eager to hear from leading experts in sensory and consumer science, and following my recent blog on fat perception, a keynote presentation from Professor Richard Mattes is high on my list!  As is the role of media in consumer and sensory testing to be discussed by Dr Dag Piper, which sounds very interesting and particularly relevant in today’s media centric society.  I’m sure the vast array of talks and posters will give all of us delegates and researchers a lot of food for thought!

Pangborn is a fantastic opportunity to learn, swap ideas, meet new people and build steps for innovation.

I hope to see you there!

New challenges in product development – The role of social media

Social MediaMy friends and I were reminiscing about some of our favourite childhood foods and drinks this weekend.  Everything from foam bananas to panda cola we put the FMCG world to rights.  Which got me thinking, some products and brands have really survived the test of time, either by tapping into the traditional and familiar or evolving and adapting with the times.

However in terms of products this is less easy than it seems.  Changes in commodity prices, manufacturing technology  enhancements even government legislation can all impact the products we see on the shelves, and the developers need to constantly manage and cope with these ever changing demands without alienating the people who love their products.  This often means continual small product changes, which are monitored and checked by sensory panels and consumers to ensure the difference isn’t noticed.  Discrimination testing, like triangle, duo-trio and more recently tetrad tests are all suitable for checking these differences to give product developers the most confidence possible when launching these adjusted version to market. However, there is still a risk, and with the rise in social media, the consumer voice is stronger than ever.

Whilst sites like Twitter and Facebook has allowed product manufacturers to communicate  more directly with consumers, consumers can also talk back.  This can highlight, emphasise and even magnify smaller product tweaks, and lead to scandals on the larger changes.  Whilst previously product changes might be published in newspapers and even discussed on TV, the ever increasing world of social media can allow consumers to voice their anger and frustrations to the world, and the manufacturers themselves.  This places more responsibility on product developers to communicate changes to consumers, which may not be ideal to the overall acceptance of the product and could even damage the brand.

Whilst products will always change overtime, a fine balance must be struck by developers to ensure consumers continue to trust and enjoy their offerings.  Social media can play a fantastic role in connecting brands and consumers more directly, however this can lead to more challenges in future for developers that are keen to stay up to date and evolve.

Generating consumer descriptions of products – It’s not all talk

Consumer language

As a sensory and consumer scientist, understanding how consumers perceive and describe products is an essential aspect of market research.  However, consumers can struggle to find the language to express and articulate product characteristics, often selecting liking and hedonic terms they feel more comfortable using.  This leads to difficulties understanding why consumers like or dislike products and could provide limited optimisation guidance for product development teams.

An ideal approach is preference mapping, allowing consumers to just rate their liking of the products, while a trained sensory panel score the samples for their characteristics.  The consumer liking data is then combined with the sensory map of product characteristics to really understand what attributes drive consumer liking and is a robust insightful tool.  However, this approach can be expensive and time consuming, and in this ever demanding world of faster insights, may not be suitable in every case.  This means asking consumers to describe products in detail, a tricky task.

So what is the best way to gain the most product information and insight directly from consumers?  Is there a practical way to get participants to really give product characteristic descriptions?  A recent study in Food Quality and Preference has compared a range of different consumer methods, to find that the highest number of descriptive terms were provided by consumers when assessed samples at an individual level or by presenting triads of samples in a repertory grid.  This is in contrast to assessing and comparing a wider number of product in the full sample set, which can lose some of the detail.

These study findings align with my own experience of product testing with consumers, where found pairwise comparisons offer the best option to get detail from consumers.  For example, if consumers are trying to describe the characteristics of plain biscuits, it is easy to compare and contrast two products for differences in key attributes such as colour, baked character, crumbliness, cereal flavour, crunchiness, sweetness and so on.  By providing both products, consumers can say things like “This biscuit is drier than that one”, and help them to express the differences in the products.  This can allow consumers to generate descriptions as well as elements of liking and crucially provide R&D teams with as much sample focussed detail to drive development and product optimisation

Sweets in jars

Flavour… more than meets the mouth

Recently brought to my attention, here is a fascinating summary of the perception of artificial flavourings, published by the BBC last year.

My colleague Sam sent me this interesting article, as she was intrigued by how the origin of flavouring can impact consumer perceptions, with some ‘artificial’ flavours possibly originating from less frequently consumed varieties of foods we know and love.  The author Chris Baraniuk uses banana flavourings to great effect, highlighting how sensory and flavour chemistry can be used to trick consumer perceptions.  On his journey through flavour he steps into the world of the full sensory experience and cross-modal interaction with Charles Spence, and even flavour encapsulation, which provides such hope for the food industry to deliver key flavours and product attributes, albeit with varying levels of success at this early stage.

Thank you Sam for sending me this article.  It summarises nicely the challenges faced by the food and drinks industry to deliver flavoursome, natural tasting foods.  This is particularly important for current FMCG trends, as shown by the 2015 Insights Show, highlighting how consumers are demanding more and more different and exciting flavour options.