Mapping the Preferences of Adult and Child Consumers for California-grown Mandarins

Abstract

<jats:p>Citrus consumers from Northern California—231 adults (ages 18–77 years) and 98 children (ages 8–12 years)—rated their overall liking (OL) and liking for appearance, flavor, and texture, as well as adequacy of sweetness, sourness, firmness, and juiciness for eight commercially available California mandarins and a tangelo. Descriptive analysis was performed on fruit from the same batch. Three adult and two child preference clusters were identified. Most of the adult and child consumers preferred samples that were high in sweetness, peelability, mandarin aroma, and firmness of fruit flesh. Sour fruit was substantially preferred by 23% of the adult consumers. Liking of appearance showed the lowest correlations with liking of flavor, texture, and OL. This work confirms past research on the necessity of sweet, sour, and peelable fruit for consumers. The findings presented here also suggest that consumer clustering can help to demystify research into preferences for mandarins and their hybrids.</jats:p>

Comparison of preference clustering outcomes from replicated consumer tests—A case study with mandarins

“…Consumer testing followed methods based on the previous testing of citrus fruits with adult consumers (Simons et al, , ). Briefly, adults were recruited from the local Davis and Sacramento, CA area and screened for appropriate age, lack of allergies, and consumption frequency of citrus.…”

“…ANOVA and Fisher's LSD were used to determine differences in overall liking as is often done with consumer liking data measured on the 9‐point hedonic scale (Lawless & Heymann, ). Fisher's LSD test was chosen for this study due to parity with past consumer evaluations of California citrus fruit (Simons et al, , ) and due to the popularity of the test in the sensory science literature (Lawless & Heymann, ). Consumer overall liking data were scaled and centered (to mean 0 and standard deviation of 1) for principal component and clustering via Ward's agglomeration method (Qannari et al, ).…”

“…Past literature has proposed the use of fuzzy clustering techniques (Westad et al, ), addition of a “noise cluster” to remove low‐signal consumers (Vigneau, Qannari, Navez, & Cottet, ), and involvement of external variables to validate the clusters (Vigneau, Charles, & Chen, ). While these methods have shown improvements in the clarity of the preference segments, use of Euclidean distancing with Ward's Method (Qannari, Vigneau, Luscan, Lefebvre, & Vey, ) has remained popular particularly in sensory evaluation of citrus fruits (Campbell et al, ; Gao, House, Gmitter Jr, et al, ; Kim, Lee, Kwak, & Kang, ; Simons, Sivertsen, & Guinard, , ). This study aimed to address cluster stability using that method.…”

Evaluation of California‐Grown Blood and Cara Cara Oranges Through Consumer Testing, Descriptive Analysis, and Targeted Chemical Profiling

“…Consumer testing took place over two consecutive days, in February of 2018. Consumer testing followed protocols established for previous testing of citrus fruits with adult and children consumers (Simons et al., , ). Briefly, adults and children (7 to 12 years old) were recruited from the local Davis and Sacramento areas.…”

“…For the children, the questions included liking for appearance, taste, texture, and overall liking on the 7‐point hedonic scale. Questions were designed based on past work with children (Guinard, ; Simons et al., , ). CATA attributes for both adults and children consisted of both descriptive and hedonic options.…”