This survey concerns industrial bread making and has been carried out within the European project entitled EU‐FRESHBAKE (October 2006 to October 2009), which concerns the bake‐off technology. This technology consists in producing bread at industrial level (frozen most of the time) and to retail the bread in “baking stations” or in small vending shops.
The objectives of this survey were (1) to better understand the attitude of the European innovations in bread and (2) to understand the main determinants of it. Two main categories of consumers were observed; (1) frequent (daily) buyers with a focus on quality and pleasure and (2) less frequent buyers (once a week) with a more pronounced interest in nutrition, shelf life and energy (process). The first group was named the “crust group” and the second one the “crumb group.” The “crumb group” seems to be the one that is the most interested in the outcomes of the EU‐FRESHBAKE project.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
This survey brings interesting information regarding the expectations of EU consumers toward innovation in bread making. Bread is a very symbolic food, carrying a lot of messages coming from religion, social classification and from well being.
Among the key messages to be withdrawn from this survey, it appears that northern and eastern Europe, and also the young population, are expecting from bread a food that must adapt to the constrain of life. It must have a long shelf life and it must carry a nutritional value. On the other hand, French and southern Europe countries are bringing more attention to the pleasure and to the freshness of the product. There is thus a complex matrix of social and qualitative attitudes toward bread from one country to the other. Innovation can be considered as a positive image in some countries, whereas it may have a very negative image in other countries.
Sensory analysis was applied to the study of thermal perception, in order to determine and characterize end‐users’ preferences concerning five indoor thermal environments generated by different heating systems. In this review, we developed a sensory profile method to describe and quantify the sensory characteristics of the thermal environments. A consumer test was also performed in order to investigate the hedonic judgment of 119 end users.
The results show that trained assessors are able to describe and quantify sensory differences between the environments with high reliability. Consumers’ preferences are influenced by both their thermal sensations in the environments, as expressed by the sensory panel, and their personal opinions of the corresponding heating systems.
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