From profiles to practice: Communicating the sensory characteristics of apples to the wider audience through simplified descriptive profiles

Abstract

A lexicon and procedure for the descriptive analysis of Finnish apples was developed to be used in research, horticulture and marketing. The lexicon developed by 13 panellists consisted of 20 attributes: four related to appearance (green, red, area of redness, amount of skin wax), five to odour (intensity, grassy, sour, sweet, fruity), six to texture (hard, crispy, mealy, juicy, soggy, tough peel) and five to flavour (intensity, sour, sweet, astringent, diverse). Using these attributes, seven autumn and eight winter cultivars were rated for intensity when the apples had reached their full maturity and again 2–3 weeks later. In principal component analysis, the odour and flavour attributes loaded mainly on the first principal component, named “sour-sweet”, and the textural attributes on the second and third principal components, called “mealy-juicy” and “crispy-mealy”, respectively. Individual graphs for each cultivar were drawn based on the attributes best differentiating the cultivars and reflecting the principal components and (colour: red, green; odour: fruity; texture: crispy, juicy, mealy; flavour: sour, sweet, diverse). These simplified profiles are suggested to be used for communicating the characteristics of the cultivars to a wider audience, to facilitate relevant consumer information.