Researchers labeled identical saltine crackers and chocolate chip cookies as either “new and improved,” “factory typical” or “consumer complaint” for the study, and then asked participants to taste the food samples and judge each on likability, freshness and a range of other qualities.

The crackers and cookies labeled “consumer complaint” received significantly lower overall liking ratings than the samples labeled “new and improved.” This held true for both saltines — a neutral example — and the cookies, which the researchers considered an inherently positive food.

“We had both negative and positive bias — but the negative bias was much bigger. That negative context had more impact than saying ‘new and improved’ had on generating better ratings,” said Christopher Simons, associate professor of food science and technology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

“On one hand, it’s not surprising. On the other hand, the degree of the impact was really surprising.”

The research is published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

An estimated 70 to 80% of new food products fail, even when consumer testing has suggested they should be successful, Simons said — which is a sign that the methods used to gauge potential customer support might need an upgrade.

“One thing my lab’s really interested in is trying to better understand and be able to predict consumer behavior,” he said. “Currently, companies use humans as an instrument to better understand the sensory properties of foods and how they drive liking. We’re trying to understand our instrument so we can build a better one that may help reduce product failures and help companies deliver products that people actually want.”

The study tested the impact of food labeling on the human predisposition to find negative experiences more significant and memorable, but also underscored the tendency for people to be skeptical of claims that a product is better just because it’s labeled “new and improved.”

The researchers recruited 120 participants aged 18 to 70 from a database of panelists from Ohio State’s Sensory Evaluation Center. Samples of two crackers or cookies — from the same packaging sleeve — were placed on three plates. Researchers told participants they would be evaluating a major supplier’s current typical factory sample, a new and improved prototype and a sample that had received customer complaints.

After each bite, participants indicated their overall liking of the sample on a 9-point scale from “dislike extremely” to “like extremely.” They also completed additional ratings of positive and negative attributes that assessed, for example, how crisp and fresh the crackers were and the intensity of the cookies’ flavor.

The results showed a clear influence of the labeling on consumer perception. With both foods, the overall liking scores were significantly lower for samples labeled “consumer complaint” compared to “new and improved.” With the saltines, the complaint scores were also significantly lower than ratings for the crackers labeled “factory typical.”

In addition, participants generally gave the “consumer complaint” crackers and cookies fewer marks for positive qualities and more hits for negative attributes.

“With the negative contextualized messaging, there were more negative attributes selected — people didn’t like it as much, it wasn’t as fresh. People had a more negative opinion of it,” Simons said. “The positive messaging slanted toward being more positive, but not nearly as much.”

There could be a lesson here for product developers, Simons said. Rather than optimizing positive attributes for a new product idea, perhaps there would be value in teasing out what customers perceive as negative and adjusting accordingly.

“If people are more sensitive to those taints, we can use it to our advantage as it relates to food,” he said. “You get a bigger bang for your buck by removing things people find negative than you do by optimizing those positive attributes. Take care of the negatives first and you’re probably going to have a more successful product.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Co-authors, all from Ohio State, include Maria Cotter, Morgan Whitecotton and Devin Peterson.

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Materials provided by Ohio State University. Original written by Emily Caldwell. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Big data collection and analysis are becoming important components of many competitive sports because they provide real-time information on athletes’ performance and fitness. However, most systems are powered by batteries, often making them bulky and inflexible. In contrast, small, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), which convert mechanical energy into electricity, are being tested for a variety of applications, from harvesting the energy of ocean waves to charging cell phones through walking. In addition to powering themselves, TENGs can convert mechanical stimuli, such as pressure, touch or motion, into electrical signals. Ding Nan, Baodong Chen, Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues wanted to adapt TENGs to a smart saddle for challenging and potentially dangerous equestrian sports.

The researchers made a thin, flexible, disk-shaped TENG that flattens when depressed and then rebounds when the pressure is removed. Under pressure, the internal layers of the TENG compress, transferring electrons from one electrode to another and generating a current, which stops when the pressure is released.

The team placed an array of seven TENGs on the top surface of a saddle so they could detect differences in pressure in various regions of the seat. Electrical signals from the array revealed whether a rider was leaning forward, sitting in an upright position or leaning backward. The smart saddle also detected when a person was standing up and sitting down (a motion called “posting” in the equestrian world). When a rider falls off, the system can transmit a wireless signal to alert others, a safety feature that could allow an injured rider to be quickly found and treated, which is especially important when riding alone. The self-powered smart saddle, which has a response time of 16 milliseconds, could someday provide real-time statistical data and fall detection to equestrians and their coaches, the researchers say.

The authors acknowledge funding from the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key R&D Project from Ministry of Science and Technology, the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, the Inner Mongolia scientific and technological achievements transformation project and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region major science and technology program.

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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Although human sensory panels are the most common way to analyze a substance’s taste, there can be a lot of differences in how people perceive flavors. To get more objective data, researchers have made bioelectronic tongues in the lab, but they either are complicated to manufacture or can’t fully replicate the way the human tongue works. Human tongues have sweet taste receptors with two large, complex structures that bind to compounds such as sugars. The outermost portion of one of these structures is called the Venus flytrap domain because its hinged, two-lobed molecular structure resembles the leaves of the insectivorous plant that close around its prey. This domain interacts with most of the sweet substances a person consumes. In a previous study, Tai Hyun Park, Seunghun Hong and colleagues made an umami sensor with human-like performance by using just the protein at the end of the umami taste receptor. So, these researchers wanted to apply the same concept to make a sweet-sensing bioelectronic tongue, using the Venus flytrap domain as electronic taste buds.

The researchers attached copies of the Venus flytrap domain that were made by bacteria in a thin layer on a gold electrode. They then connected multiple gold electrodes together with carbon nanotubes, making a field-effect transistor device. When solutions of naturally sweet sucrose or of the artificial sweetener saccharin were applied to the device, the current decreased. The sensor responded to these solutions down to the 0.1 femtomolar level, which is 10 million times more sensitive than previous bioelectronic sweet sensors, the researchers say. The device could also consistently measure the sweetness of real drinks, such as apple juice and sucrose-sweetened chamomile tea, but it did not show a response when cellobiose (a tasteless sugar) or monosodium glutamate (a salt known as MSG) were introduced. Because the bioelectronic tongue was both sensitive and selective for sweet-tasting compounds, the researchers say this could be a powerful tool for the health care, pharmaceutical, and food and drink industries.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) of Korea, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) of Korea, Samsung Electronics, the European Research Council (ERC) within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Institutional Program.

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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.