S. Cordelle*, E. Cartier-Lange, C. Boudalier, C. Urbano, M. Visalli, P. Schlich

INRA Centre Européen des Sciences du Goût, France

There is a growing interest in assessing preferences for fat, sugar and salt, as they are linked to several diseases. Our challenge is to develop a sensory tool to quantify consumers’ intrinsic preferences for fat, sweet and salt and better understand consumers’ behaviors. This paper presents a foresight study, which aim was to investigate consumers’ preferences for sweet and salted products varying in fat or sugar contents, and to assess whether preferences for fat and sweet are correlated to each other.

Overall preferences for crisps, crackers and cakes were recorded. For crisps and crackers, 696 consumers evaluated a commercially available classic product and a low-fat variant of that product, in a comparative way. Then, they evaluated 6 samples of cakes. Two samples were replicates of the same medium cake. The four remaining samples were obtained by adding or removing sugar or oil from the medium recipe, so that there were a sweeter and fatter sample, a sweeter and less fat one, a less sweet and fatter one and a less sweet and less fat one.

For the 3 types of products, there was an age effect on mean scores: children gave higher scores than adults. There was a gender effect on mean scores only for cakes: women gave lower scores than men. In average, consumers liked the low-fat crisps better than the classic ones, but they liked the classic crackers better than the low-fat ones. For cakes, higher scores were obtained when fat and sugar contents increase. This was not observed for all age groups, as the youngest and the oldest consumers did not show any difference in their preferences for the 6 cakes. This study suggests that preference for fat depends on the type of food considered. Moreover, individual preferences for fat and sweet were not correlated to each other.