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Everyday food products are sold on the basis of the sensory pleasure they deliver and how they meet normal nutritional needs. Functional foods, however, target some known health need or specific physiological result. Functional foods also bear an extra burden, as they must address the issue of flavor as well.
Unless the sensory properties of a functional food are acceptable and consumers are willing to use the product, functional benefits are without purpose. Sensory testing, therefore, is as important to functional foods as it is to fast food or chocolate cookies.
While sensory testing plays a limited role in clinical trials and various safety and efficacy studies, the sensory scientist can help establish behavioral protocols to measure mood or a state of relaxation. Such standards enable products to be measured for calming effects, sleep-inducing qualities, impact on mental alertness and so forth.
Ultimately the taste determines whether the consumer will buy the product, just as taste determines the acceptability of a frozen food or a confection. It is in ascertaining consumer acceptance of the product's taste and intent to purchase that sensory testing is a necessity.
Sensory testing methodologies are the same for functional foods as for traditional food products. The taste tests conducted in central locations and home-use tests, as well as the scales employed are used for all food categories. The difference with the sensory testing of functional foods is in the test protocols.
Typically foods are tested in ordinary laboratory conditions where precise preparation and obtaining accurate, reproducible data is more important that eating in familiar environments - a soup tastes the same in a focus room as it does in one's own kitchen. However, this is not true when testing a sports drink promoted for use during strenuous physical workouts. That demands sampling in an environment appropriate to the intended use. A chemical or medicinal taste undesirable in a laboratory may be an acceptable cost of efficacy in the appropriate situation.
All products should be tested with the intended target market, but this is more critical with functional foods. Narrower markets make it more difficult to screen and recruit testers, but it must be done even for very specific groups. A test of a product for terminally ill patients, when conducted in a hospital, had counterintuitive results: the drink needed to be bland since patients could not tolerate strong flavors, and needed to be thin enough to drink, but thick enough to be perceived as supplying total nutrition. Another example is sports-nutrition bars aimed at helping athletes recover after practice. A bar that was judged too sweet in a laboratory environment was acceptable when tested by professional sports teams after long workouts.
Unless
the sensory properties of
a functional food are
acceptable, functional benefits
are without purpose
Concept testing and packing tests for functional foods can also depend on appropriate settings. Does the consumer for a geriatric food supplement have handgrip strength to open the container? Does the size and shape of a bottle opening effect the use of the sports drink? (The answer to the second question is yes - a wide- mouth bottle allowing consumers to gulp the drink.)
In addition, sensory testing can determine consumer willingness to trade some degree of attribute preference for a promise of functionality. To test such tradeoffs, the functionality is not revealed until the respondent has reacted to various attributes, pricing or packing. The perceived desirability of the function can then have a marked effect on consumer acceptability. Framing a test to be appropriate to the intended use, then is the key to obtaining reliable marketing data.
Jeffrey J. Kroll and Daniel R. Kroll are executive vice presidents with Peryam & Kroll Research Corporation.