CHAPTER 14: Coffee – Sensory Aspects and Consumer Perception

The sensory quality of a product is related to the adequate levels of sensory attributes in all aspects of the appearance, aroma, flavour, texture and aftertaste; therefore, to investigate how consumers perceive the product is essential to achieve success in the competitive market. It is known that consumers create subjective impressions on the quality of a product based on psychological processes, which are influenced by many extrinsic factors such as the level of previous knowledge and cognitive competencies of each individual consumer, as well as product packaging and label. On the other hand, the sensory perception of coffee beverage is a complex issue, and several methods can be used to discriminate, to characterise or to evaluate samples in relation to consumer liking of a coffee beverage. All these aspects were focused on this chapter taking into account different sensory panels, i.e. trained and consumer panel. Finally, the recent trend of using consumers to describe products is becoming a popular, quick and easy tool to acquire sensory product characterisation. A recent methodology that enables to achieve this goal is CATA questions. A list of attributes is presented to participants and they are asked to mark which words, phrases or terms are appropriate to describe their opinion about the sample under evaluation. An example is provided and comments about this methodology applied to coffee studies are discussed.