L. Dreyfuss, H. Nicod, Y. T. Tao, S. Sanesi, M. Ferreira et al.

1) ADRIANT®, France; 2) SILLIKER, China; 3) SILLIKER, Italia; 4) SILLIKER, Portugal


In the last ten years, few studies have focused on the comparison between sensory profiles from consumers and sensory profiles done by trained assessors. Most of them conclude that there is a good agreement between the two methods regarding the sensory maps of the products. Moreover they put in evidence that consumers give additional information compared to sensory experts and that sometimes they focus on some specific groups of product properties.

On another hand, performing descriptive analysis on the same products in various continents like Asia and Europe highlights the problem of descriptors understanding.

The objective of this work is to compare sensory profiles done with consumers from different European countries and from China in order to highlight the differences of perception due to the culture, but also the common points of perception.

Four countries are involved in this study concerning eight products known in all of them: Italy, France, Portugal and China. In a first time, focus groups with consumers in each country allow to establish a list of descriptors characterizing the products. Each descriptor is defined in a consumer language and associated with local references.

In a second step, sixty consumers of the product category are recruited in each country. They are asked to come twice in a central location in order to evaluate the eight products and to profile them.

The analysis of the results is focused on the way the consumers describe the products and on the comparison of the used words. The results show some discrepancies in the structure of the sensory maps between the different countries and mainly highlight differences in the vocabulary usage.