How does it make you feel? A new approach to measuring emotions in food product experience

• A multistep approach (EmoSemio) to measuring emotional responses associated to a specific product category is developed.
• Using full sentences instead of adjectives helps to reduce ambiguity in emotion questionnaires.
• Emotional measures provide increased product differentiation compared to the hedonic responses.
• Sensory properties elicit emotions.

The objective of this study was to define an approach to describe the emotional profile specific to a product category able to solve some limitations of the current approaches. A multistep approach was applied to measure emotions related to consumer liking for a specific food product category, chocolate and hazelnut spreads, chosen as the first case of application. Three interrelated experiments were conducted: (1) selection of products that spanned the most relevant sensory variation within the considered product category; (2) development of a product specific questionnaire (EmoSemio) based on interviews conducted with a modified version of the Repertory Grid Method and analysed with a semiotic approach; and (3) collection of liking and emotional consumer responses with EmoSemio and with EsSense Profile™ questionnaires. Both questionnaires used to measure emotional responses produced information that is not captured by only measuring acceptability. However results from ANOVA model applied on emotion ratings highlighted important differences between the two questionnaires. The product specific questionnaire was found to discriminate across the products more effectively, with a higher percentage of discriminating emotions and a higher number of sample groups discriminated by each emotions (LSD99% post hoc test). Different factors contributed to these results: (a) the product-specific and language/culture-specific nature of the questionnaire; (b) a different and clearer way to express emotions in EmoSemio: not using single adjectives but full sentences helps to reduce ambiguity; and (c) a reduced length – 23 instead of 39 items. For these reasons, EmoSemio approach seems to be appropriate when the emotional profile of a specific product category is of interest, allowing a fine-grained analysis with relatively modest costs as to the benefits (25 interviews). Further studies are needed to experiment EmoSemio on other product categories, testing its reliability and suitability with different food and also non-food products.