Development and test of a new fuzzy-QFD approach for characterizing customers rating of extra virgin olive oil

Abstract This paper presents the development of an innovative fuzzy-QFD based methodology for characterizing customer rating of food products. The method has been tested on different samples of extra virgin olive oil to verify its suitability. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of such multi-criterion technique not only for the design and development of new products that meet customers’ requirements, but also for testing the quality of existing ones. The main innovation of the method, consists in the application of the fuzzy logic to address the issue, common in many decisional techniques, of dealing with data deriving from subjective verbally expressed evaluations that cannot be treated with mathematical models. The objective of this work was to test the combined assessment technique based on quality function deployment and fuzzy logic method for determining which characteristics of extra virgin olive oil influence most of the acceptance of the consumers toward the product. The relationship between consumer expectations, defined by a market survey, and main attributes of the examined products were assessed by means of the House of Quality (HOQ). The results obtained allowed to classify the quality of different brands of olive oil with respect to customer preferences.