Research survey of Japanese consumers on texture vocabulary (Studies on Japanese texture terms part 2)

Abstract

The present study investigated the vocabulary for food texture of Japanese consumers through questionnaires in metropolitan area and Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area. Four hundred and forty five terms collected through questionnaires and interviews to texture researchers in our previous study were judged whether each term was used by consumers or not. In each questionnaire about 200 terms were listed because 445 terms were too many to judge by one subject. Four hundred and forty five terms were divided into 4 groups and two of them were selected at any combination so that combinatorial effect and order effect were reduced. Three thousand five hundred and thirty three subjects judged whether each term was used to describe food properties or not. Out of the 2 582 collected questionnaires, 2 437 were completed and thus used for further analysis. The criterion of the percentage of judgments as food expressions was 75% or greater and 135 terms met this criterion with a confidence level of 95%. The terms judged as food expressions at 90% or greater were 66 terms with a confidence level of 95% such as "katai (hard)", "creamy", "saku-saku (crispy)", "pari-pari (crispy)" and "neba-neba (sticky)". They were considered to be the core terms of texture vocabulary of Japanese consumers.