Engineering out food boredom: a product development approach that combines home use tests and time-preference analysis

This paper deals with the measurement of food boredom, using the organizing principle of time¯preference measurement (viz. interest in a food assuming that the food had not been eaten for a specific period). In an attempt to distinguish between boredom and liking, boredom is defined operationally by the change in liking with repeated ingestion, and not defined by the degree of liking itself. The paper demonstrates the approach through a case history with a condiment, using experimental design of formulations, consumer evaluation of interest in the product under different time periods, and the analysis of the results in terms of boredom. The data suggest that the consumers differentiate between overall liking and the degree to which a food could become boring, that these two variables may not highly correlate, and that surprisingly visual cues promote boredom in the product. From the methodological viewpoint, time¯preference measurement allows the developer and researcher to operationalize one aspect of boredom and optimize a food in order to maintain acceptance but reduce boredom.