shown in Figure 6. Most of the Danish consumers found Jonagold ap-
ples to be crisp, although a few associated it with Boskoop. A similar
variation was observed among the British consumers. The Danish con-
sumers described the texture of Cox apples as mealy, while the British
described it as coarse and spongy.
GPA suggested a crosscultural consensus with respect to consumer
perception of mealiness in apples. The descriptor mealy was well under-
stood by Danish consumers, but not British consumers, who used a wider
variety of descriptors like coarse and spongy. Future work will establish
similar vocabularies for consumers in Belgium and Spain and establish
a crosscultural vocabulary for consumer perception of mealiness.
Although there appears to be an increasing globalization of consumer
patterns within the food area, Askegaard and Madsen (1995) believed
that major national and regional differences persist. This did not appear
to be so in this study, however; but it is important to highlight here that
the use of the crosscultural approach in the case of food has consider-
able cultural significance (Askegaard and Madsen, 1995; Fischler, 1990;
Mennell et al., 1992), thus emphasizing that the results from one coun-
try may not be readily generalized to other countries (Grunert, 1997).
Mealiness—A Multilingual Vocabulary 169FIGURE 9.6Curved box plots of the crisp and mealy descriptors used by British and
Danish consumers.