Application of Food Kansei Model to Quality Design for Margarine conforming the preference of consumers

Introduction Food “Kansei” engineering has been playing an increasingly important role, providing innovative stimuli to new food development, product management and marketing strategy in the food industry. Its main object is to develop the consumer-oriented technologies and systems for quantitatively relating the physicochemical and informational attributes of a food with psychological factors regarding palatability as well as eating habits of individual. A Food Kansei Model (FKM) provides a theoretical framework to formulate the causal relationships among the analyzed characteristics, perceived quality and palatability of food products and successfully applied to the design of green tea beverage conforming the preference of consumer (Ikeda et al, 2004) and also process optimization of freeze-drying in designing volatile compounds of coffee (Sagara et al, 2005). The objective of this study is to develop the methodology for designing table margarine which conform preferences of consumers based on the FKM. To accomplish the objective, appropriate descriptors which are important for consumers were sorted out, and significant perceptual factors and their priority were identified from the data of sensory evaluation which was performed using the proposed descriptors.