Emotional response evoked when looking at and trying a new food product, measured through images and words. A case-study with novel fruit and vegetable smoothies

Abstract Little research has been published on emotional responses evoked by completely new, innovative food products. The objectives of the present study were 1) to assess the emotional response to new products (fruit and vegetable smoothies in a drink pouch) in two different scenarios: looking at the smoothie pouch, or tasting the smoothie with the smoothie pouch alongside; 2) to compare the information obtained when the participants use photographs or use words to express emotions. In the Pack-alone scenario, similar emotional spaces and sample configurations were obtained with both images and words. In the Pack-and-tasting scenario, the richness of the emotional response increased when using images. In both scenarios, the participants used a greater number of negative emotions when these were presented as images rather than as words. This could be considered an advantage, as it enables some negative emotional loads to be portrayed. The present results also demonstrate that evaluating the emotional response allows effective discrimination between samples with similar overall liking scores.