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. 2021 Mar 23;10(3):684.
doi: 10.3390/foods10030684.

Consumer-Led Adaptation of the EsSense Profile® for Herbal Infusions

Célia Rocha  1   2 , Ana Pinto Moura  3 , Diana Pereira  1   2 , Rui Costa Lima  2 , Luís Miguel Cunha  1
Affiliations

Consumer-Led Adaptation of the EsSense Profile® for Herbal Infusions

Célia Rocha et al. Foods. .

Abstract

This work aimed to adapt the EsSense Profile® emotions list to the discrimination of herbal infusions, aiming to evaluate the effect of harvesting conditions on the emotional profile. A panel of 100 consumers evaluated eight organic infusions: lemon verbena, peppermint, lemon thyme, lemongrass, chamomile, lemon balm, globe amaranth and tutsan, using a check-all-that-apply (CATA) ballot with the original EsSense Profile®. A set of criteria was applied to get a discriminant list. First, the terms with low discriminant power and with a frequency mention below 35% were removed. Two focus groups were also performed to evaluate the applicability of the questionnaire. The content analysis of focus groups suggests the removal of the terms good and pleasant, recognized as sensory attributes. Six additional terms were removed, considered to be too similar to other existing emotion terms. Changes in the questionnaire, resulting in a list of 24 emotion terms for the evaluation of selected herbal infusions, were able to discriminate beyond overall liking. When comparing finer differences between plants harvested under different conditions, differences were identified for lemon verbena infusions, yielding the mechanical cut of plant tips as the one leading to a more appealing evoked emotions profile.

Keywords: EsSense Profile® adaptation; focus-groups; harvesting method; lemon verbena; loose-leaf herbal infusions.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest and inform that the company Sense Test is a full research partner of projects “Infusão Premium” and “4Cs”, financed by National and International funds. The funders for these projects had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Absolute frequency of elicitation of the different emotion-related terms in the EsSense Profile® questionnaire (n = 100). The dotted grey circle represents the 35% citation threshold. Terms yielding significant differences between herbal infusions are marked according to Cochran’s test: *** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Configurations of samples (triangles) and significant emotion-related terms (circles) in the first and second dimensions of the correspondence analysis applied to check-all-that-apply (CATA) counts from the four infusions: lemongrass, lemon thyme, lemon verbena and peppermint.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Angles (in degrees) between the vectors from the projections of the four herbal infusions and food-elicited emotion terms in the correspondence analysis map, resulting from multidimensional alignment (MDA) analysis. Dark bars represent the angles below 45°—representing emotion terms positively correlated with the samples, as well as the angles above 135°—representing emotion terms negatively correlated with the samples.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Angles (in degrees) between the vectors from the projections of the lemon verbena infusions (plant part and type of cut) and food-elicited emotion terms in the correspondence analysis map, resulting from multidimensional alignment (MDA) analysis. Dark bars represent the angles below 45°—with emotion terms positively correlated with the samples, as well as the angles above 135°—with emotion terms negatively correlated with the samples.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The emotional profile of the samples (a) lemongrass; (b) peppermint; (c) lemon verbena; and (d) lemon thyme from the evaluation with the original list terms (continuous line) and the one with the adapted list which intended to assess the impact of the harvesting conditions, of the average of treatments (dotted lines).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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