Paula Varela

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at NOFIMA Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research

Child malnutrition is a major health problem in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Complementary foods made from African indigenous and locally available raw materials are often low in protein and nutrients. It is, therefore, important to supply complementary foods that are nutritious and affordable, and with an acceptable consistency and taste. The objective of...

Culture is a well-known driver of food choices, and therefore, it could also impact food pairing preferences. Food pairing has been studied from different approaches; however, little cross-cultural research has been done. This work explored food and beverage pairing using projective mapping (PM) to create maps of food-beverage combinations. Four co...

Background: Prototypes play a central role in applied food research and innovation (R&I), serving as the initial representations of new products, process, or project ideas. They function as "boundary objects", facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue, knowledge creation, and cooperation. Despite their significance, challenges arise due to the differ...

Bread can be a major contributor to sodium intake, but sodium chloride reduction poses difficulties since it influences the functional properties of dough and flavor of bread. This study evaluated dough and bread properties in reduced-sodium systems containing fermented or unfermented macroalgae Saccharina latissima or Alaria esculenta. Recipes con...

In this chapter, we review the relation between food texture perception, consumer preferences and satiety expectations. We assess the methods used to measure and model these relationships, as well as presenting two case studies on: the role of dynamic texture perception in consumers’ expectations of satiety and satiation and identifying temporal dr...

Cluster analysis is often used to group consumers based on their hedonic responses to products. We give a motivating example in which conventional cluster analyses converge on a solution where consumers do not agree on which products they like. We show why this occurs. We state a goal: to group together consumers who have a shared opinion of which...

Brewer's spent grain (BSG), a by-product of the brewing industry, has great potential as food additive. BSG is particularly rich in protein and fibre content which makes it an ideal nutritional fortifier for biscuits. However, adding BSG to biscuits can lead to changes in sensory perception and consumer acceptance. This study explored the temporal...

Texturized vegetable protein (TVP) from a blend of faba bean protein concentrate and an oat beta-glucan rich fraction was produced by low-moisture extrusion to combine nutritional benefits of both ingredients. The effect of extrusion conditions (temperature in zone 6 (HZ6), feed rate (FR) and moisture content (MC)) on physicochemical, nutritional,...

Different approaches for handling consumer segments in L‐shape data are compared in a study conducted in Norway. Consumers evaluated eight different yoghurt samples with profiles varying in three intrinsic attributes following a full factorial design. Three blocks of data were collected including sensory properties, liking ratings, and consumer att...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is often used to explore sensory and consumer test data about products on multicollinear sensory attributes. In this paper, we propose an approach for investigating paired comparisons between products and their uncertainties in the principal components. We use the truncated total bootstrap (TTB) procedure to simul...

Background: The ageing processes occur slowly over time and are often not detectable by the individual. Thus, preparing for dietary needs in later years should start at an earlier age than most people realise. Objective: This study aims at better understanding what characterises food-related practices in active, home-living older adults, in orde...

Introduction In 2012, the estimated global prevalence of pre-diabetes was 280 million, and the prevalence is expected to rise to 400 million by 2030. Oat-based foods are a good source of beta-glucans, which have been shown to lower postprandial blood glucose. Studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the long-term intake of beta-glucan-enriched brea...

The food industry has recently been under unprecedented pressure due to major global challenges, such as climate change, exponential increase in world population and urbanization, and the worldwide spread of new diseases and pandemics, such as the COVID-19. The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) has been gaining momentum since 2015 and has...

Norway has lower meat consumption than other North European countries. Meat is acknowledged as important for food security in Norway, as Norway's agricultural possibilities are best suited for free-ranging and self-foraging animals. Meat has a strong position in the Norwegian diet, particularly as a centrepiece for special occasions. Good taste, pr...

Entomophagy - intentional consumption of insects - is practiced in several regions of the world, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the Western world, edible insects have been growing in popularity as novel food and feed. The main objective of this cross-cultural study, performed in Portugal and Norway, was to evaluate the determina...

Sensory scientists have adapted several sensory methods to fit children's cognitive abilities. Although several discrimination methods have been reported with children, the A‐not‐A test has not been studied yet. The aims of this work were to: (i) evaluate the feasibility of using the A‐Not‐A test with school‐aged children, and (ii) compare how the...

This commentary addresses the issue of remote testing with sensory and consumer panels, within the VSI Covid-19 and Sensory Science in Food Quality and preference. In particular, two papers on the topic will be discussed: Dinella et al. “Remote testing: Sensory test during Covid-19 pandemic and beyond” and Han Seok et al. “Stay safe in your vehicle...

Sensory and consumer research increasingly aims to gain direct input from children to study their eating behaviour. However, answering self-administered questionnaires can be challenging for children. In this sense, the prediction of basic emotions via facial decoding, generating quantitative observational data, could offer an alternative to questi...

Food pairing has been widely studied to understand the patterns that explain how people pair different foods and ingredients and, therefore, to obtain successful pairings and good recommendations for consumers. Social media has become a common way of exchanging information; therefore, we proposed to use it as a tool for exploring beer-food pairing...

To tackle current nutritional issues like obesity, it could be valuable to involve children in the development of healthy food products that they will actively chose and enjoy. The aims of the present exploratory study were (i) to assess a methodology for early-stage idea generation through co-creation, for the development of healthy snacks with pr...

Consumers can be clustered based on their product-related check-all-that-apply (CATA) responses. We identify two paradoxes that can occur if these clusters are derived from conventional similarity coefficients. The first paradox is that clustering similar consumers can nullify within-cluster sensory differentiation of products. The second paradox i...

A shift towards a plant-based diet is desired to promote sustainability, improve health, and minimize animal suffering. However, many consumers are not willing to make such a transition, because of attachment to meat and unwillingness to change habits. The present work explored the perception of Norwegian and French consumers' attitudes, barriers a...

Different approaches for handling L-shaped data are compared for the first time in a study conducted with Norwegian consumers. Consumers (n = 101) valuated eight different yoghurt profiles varying in three intrinsic attributes such as viscosity, particle size, and flavour intensity following a full factorial design. Sensory attributes, consumers’ l...

Highlights • Projective mapping was useful to explore food and beverage pairing. • Food-beverage pairing patterns were found within Mexican people. • Salty snacks, pizza, peanut, and shrimp were found to pair well with beer. • Soda paired well with tortillas, chili, and chicken. • Projective mapping was a suitable technique for analyzing food a...

Children's involvement in new product development may contribute to ensure that healthy alternatives meet their wants and needs. Co-creation is a potential approach to bridge the world of the child and the grown-up product developer. In this context, the objective of the present work was to explore the potential of a co-creation approach with child...

The study aimed to assess the application of the Approach avoidance task (AAT) with children to measure implicit motivational tendencies towards foods differing in sweetness and calorie content and to explore the relationship between approach bias and explicit measurements of expected liking, attitudes, and hunger state and their relation to paired...

Consumers are increasingly interested in health and sustainability aspects of their diets. Meat reduction diets have gained popularity with some consumers, leading to an increase in plant-based products in the markets. Additionally, the demand for more natural and healthier products is associated with the clean label trend. But how these two trends...

Food packaging design has become a key component of the marketing mix of companies to ensure the long-term success of their products, and to convey information that set apart their products from competitors. The aim of this review is to critically discuss the role of food packaging on children's diet. Food package design plays a key role in attract...

This article presents a discussion of principal components analysis of descriptive sensory data. Focus is on standardization, many correlated variables, validation, and the use of descriptive data in preference mapping. Different ways of performing the analysis are presented and discussed with focus on how to obtain informative and reliable results...

Sugar intake among children has raised concern worldwide as it exceeds nutritional recommendations. Sugar contributes to the daily energy intake, without providing additional nutritional value and is associated with several negative health outcomes. Sugars added to foods during industrial processing have been identified as the main source of sugar...

Labels have been reported to influence children's perception and choice of foods. However, the influence of label information on parents’ food choices for their children has not received as much attention in the literature yet. In this context, the objectives of the present study were: i) to evaluate the impact of label information on parents' heal...

Capturing temporal sensory changes has been the focus in recent research to better understand how consumers perceive food products. This information can be linked to consumer expectations (e.g., liking, satiety) to study the sensory drivers throughout the eating experience, namely temporal drivers. This study explores the use of penalty-lift analys...

In the present study, the influences of color and awareness of the presence of three different naturally colored antioxidants, were studied using the projective consumer method Word Association. Moringa, propolis, and red grape pomace extracts were added to three different food products categories (bread, yogurt, and pate) as case studies. To explo...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate children's hedonic sensitivity to sugar reduction in three dairy products: vanilla milk desserts, chocolate-flavoured milk, and vanilla yoghurt. For each product, a regular sample and five samples with different reduction in added-sugar content were formulated. The regular sample contained the suga...

The main objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of production of meat analogues from a faba bean protein concentrate (obtained from dry fractionation) using high-moisture extrusion (HME). The impact of the temperature, ratio between water and product feed rate and product feed rate on the physicochemical properties of the meat a...

Many sensory, cognitive, and physiological factors contribute to satiation and satiety responses; sensory and cognitive factors lead to feelings of satiation and short-term satiety. This research aims at understanding how sensory perception and consumer preferences are related to food intake of semisolid foods, using a case study on yogurt with con...

According to the WHO, childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the twenty-first century. In this context, finding ways to make the healthier food choices the preferred ones can be a valuable contribution to solving this multifaceted problem. Sensory and consumer science offers a wide range of tools that can support t...

Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) was compared with novel sensory methodology on five high‐end loudspeakers using five tracks. The focus of the study was on the ability of different sensory methods to predict quality assessments (liking) made by consumers. Preference mapping indicates that projective mapping (PM) and Check‐All‐That‐Apply (CAT...

Sensory scientists have adapted several sensory methods to fit children’s cognitive abilities according to the different developmental stages. Although children have been reported to be able to use sensory methods to describe foods and beverages, published applications are limited to static characterizations. In this context, the objective of the s...

Background Personalisation of foods opens for improving individuals’ quality of life. In the personalised food approach, the focus of research is food, its components and the possibilities of different processes throughout the food value chain to impact on individuals and their needs. Scope and approach In this paper, we will provide an overview o...

Due to its simplicity, Check-all-that-apply (CATA) is a promising method for consumer studies with children to generate sensory and other descriptions of samples, and to find their drivers of liking. This paper explores how children’s approach to the CATA test influences the outcome, based on two case studies that illustrate suitable setups for CAT...

In the development of sensory and consumer science, data are often collected in several blocks responding to different aspects of consumer experience. Sometimes the task of organizing the data and explaining their relation is non-trivial, especially when considering structural (casual) relationship between data sets. In this sense, PLS path modelli...

The high availability of products with high sugar content, particularly among those targeted as children, has been identified as one of the factors that contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic. For this reason, product reformulation has been recommended as one of the strategies that can be implemented to achieve short-term reductions in childr...

Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) and Temporal Check-all-that-Apply (TCATA) from three different case studies are compared by means of canonical correlation analysis, orthogonalization and principal component analysis of the vertically unfolded data (which means that the matrices compared have samples*timepoints in the rows and attributes in t...

Estudiar al consumidor y la interacción producto-consumidor no es una tarea sencilla. El consumidor no compra por azar. Cada producto y cada servicio que el consumidor utiliza corresponden generalmente a una serie de necesidades. Las características de un producto son diseñadas para proporcionarle al consumidor ciertos beneficios en función de sus...

The objective of this study was to explore the production of an expanded snack entirely based on pea- and oat-rich fractions using the extrusion technology. The effect of the die temperature, HZ6 (146–175 °C) and blend moisture content, MC (11.2 and 16.8% dry basis) were investigated aiming at maximizing expansion, while obtaining a good texture an...

The aim of the present study was to determine how variation in the biscuit matrix affects both the degree of in vitro fragmentation and the starch hydrolysis that occurs during the oral phase of digestion. Using three different oat ingredient types (oat flour, small flakes, and big flakes) and baking powder (or none), six biscuits with different ma...

Recent research suggests that a robot's motors make sounds that can influence users' perception of the robot's characteristics. To more deeply understand users' associations with specific sonic characteristics, we adapted methods from sensory science including Check All That Apply (CATA) questions and Polarized Sensory Positioning (PSP) to tease ou...

Culture is an important driver of food preferences and largely determines exposure to ingredients combinations. The cultural variety in culinary practices across countries raises the question of how flavor combinations are built and how they transcend individual differences in consumers’ preferences. For example, in Latin America, despite having si...

Expectations of satiation and satiety have been increasingly investigated because of the interest in how they, along with liking, can modulate portion-size selection. Consumer characteristics can also be important when consumers select their portion size. However, the contribution and interaction of consumers and product aspects to portion size sel...

consumers with difference in mouth behaviours

Consumers are said to increasingly assess processed food in terms of whether or not they perceive it to be ‘clean label’ food. This term refers to what is seen as little processed and ‘natural’ or ‘free from’ negatively associated ingredients. However, it is difficult for food producers to predict how the product ingredients will be perceived, and...

Projective mapping (PM) or napping® has attained much attention in recent literature as a method for fast sensory profiling and measurement of consumer perception. However, little work has been done to understand the consumer's individual differences in these experiments. In this work, segmentation criteria based on the Procrustes distance are expl...

Individual Differences in Sensory and Consumer Science: Experimentation, Analysis and Interpretation presents easily readable, state-of-the-art coverage on how to plan and execute experiments that give rise to individual differences, also providing the framework for successful analysis and interpretation of results. The book highlights the differen...

For describing the evolution of sensory properties during eating, dynamic sensory methods are still being developed and optimised. Temporal Dominance of Sensations (TDS) and Temporal Check All That Apply (TCATA) are currently the most used and discussed. The aim of this study was to compare TDS, TCATA and a variant of TDS, performed by modality (M-...

This chapter reviews the most relevant advancements in consumer science, from a methodological perspective, starting from a historical standpoint and highlighting the main areas of development and discussing the whys. Among the topics reviewed are the shift from standardized sensory description to consumer-based feedback; going beyond hedonics towa...

Sensory characterization is one of the most powerful and widely used tools in sensory science, in both industrial and academic settings. For decades, descriptive analysis with trained assessors has been regarded as the gold standard for describing the sensory characteristics of products. However, the development of several alternative and flexible...

Methods for Consumer Research, Volume One: New Approaches to Classic Methods brings together world leading experts in global consumer research who provide a fully comprehensive state-of-the-art coverage of advances in the classical methods of consumer science. The book touches on the latest developments in qualitative techniques, including coverage...

Methods for Consumer Research, Volume Two: Alternative Approaches and Special Applications brings together world leading experts in global consumer research who provide a fully comprehensive state-of-the-art coverage of emerging methodologies and their innovative application. The book puts consumer research in-context with coverage of immersive tec...

TDS describes the evolution of the dominant sensory attributes during consumption. Dominance can be assessed as the sensation that captures the attention, the most striking, or the new sensation that pops up, but not necessarily the most intense. This wide definition implies that individual assessors within a panel might assess dominance differentl...

Consumers in industrialized countries are nowadays much more interested in information about the production methods and components of the food products that they eat, than they had been 50 years ago. Some production methods are perceived as less “natural” (i.e. conventional agriculture) while some food components are seen as “unhealthy” and “unfami...

The comparison of temporal methods

This work explores a new affective approach to projective mapping, based on consumers' choices or preferences. Two sessions, one week apart, were performed with the same consumers, using whole bread as a case study. Overall liking ratings (OL) were gathered in blind conditions and samples were also profiled by a trained panel using generic descript...

Dynamic sensory perception has become of interest particularly related to consumers’ affective response, however, better understanding the eating experience further than liking, taking into account how the dynamic sensory perception correlates to satiety perception becomes also very relevant. The objective of this work was to better understand sati...

Projective mapping (PM), one of the most holistic product profiling methods in approach, is increasingly being used to uncover consumers' perception of products and packages. Assessors rely on a process of synthesis for evaluating product information, which would determine the relative importance of the perceived characteristics they use for mappin...

Bitter and sulfurous taste and variable sensory quality of Brassica vegetables are often hinders for consumers to increase their consumption. The project ‘BrassicaTaste’ (2016-2019) investigates: 1. Sensory attributes for different cultivars of cauliflower, cabbage and leafy cabbage. 2. How nutrient- and water availability influence both sensory at...

The aim of this study was to evaluate consumers' perception of a complex set of stimuli as aromatically enriched wines. For that, two consumer based profiling methods were compared, concurrently run with overall liking measurements: projective mapping based on choice or preference (PM-C), a newly proposed method, and check-all-that-apply (CATA) que...

Understanding the interaction of sensory and extrinsic product attributes in consumer preferences has been identified as one of the key pillars for raising the likelihood of food products’ success in the market. Over the course of the last decade there has been increased attention on research emphasizing a combination of these food-choice driving p...