scales. Anchor points were: 0not perceptible and 100strongly per-
ceptable.
Consumer Acceptance
Acceptance tests with a representative target group of 98 housewives
were implemented. The assessors judged the products’ characteristics:
first impression, appearance, smell, taste, aftertaste, mouthfeel in gen-
eral and, as a special complement to the mouthfeel, both characteristics
firmness whilst chewing and peel remaining in the mouth. As a final
question the overall recommendability was asked. We used unstructured
scales with the anchor points 0—very unpleasantand 100—very pleas-
ant.For the characteristic firmness whilst chewing we used an unstruc-
tured ideal point scale with the anchor points: 0too soft, 50ideal,
100 too firm.. The scores from ideal to too soft and from ideal to too
firm were treated separately.
Sweet Note
Experiment 1
The amount of reducing sugars and titratable acids was significantly
different in the tomato varieties. The amount of reducing sugars and
titratable acid was not significantly related to the consumer acceptance
ratings, but the “sweet” impression, which was detected by the mem-
bers of the quantitative descriptive panel, clearly was related to the ac-
ceptance rating “recommendable.” We had no explanation for this
deviation from close relationship between sugar concentration and sweet
descriptive impression (Table 10.3).
A principal-component analysis, which combined sensory and in-
strumental data, showed the close association between the descriptive
attribute sweet impression and the consumer acceptance value for “rec-
ommendable.” The descriptively assessed juiciness and the concentra-
tion of reducing sugars only showed a loose correlation with the first
principal component (Figure 10.1).
Experiment 2
An increase of sugar and acid concentrations by plant nutrition with
more concentrated nutrient solution could be demonstrated in Experi-
Sweet Note 187