Dados do Trabalho

Título

PLANT-BASED CHOCOLATES: ASSESSMENT OF CONSUMERS' SENSORY PERCEPTION COMPARED TO MILK CHOCOLATE

Introdução

Plant-based chocolates (PBC) are products developed without any dairy components or other ingredients of animal origin. In this context, plant-based proteins (PBP) can be alternative ingredients to milk in the development of PBC, and sensory analysis is needed to obtain more information about these products. Thus, the study aimed to develop 4 PBC with pea, lentil, fava bean, and sunflower PBP, and 1 milk-based chocolate (MBC) for comparison, and to assess consumers' sensory perception of them.

Material e Métodos

PBC and MBC were developed with 44.5% and 40.0% cocoa solids respectively, with the inclusion of 15% PBP or 20% milk (to result in products with similar total lipid content), as well as sugar, vanilla flavoring, and soy lecithin. The samples were evaluated by 128 untrained tasters for 9 sensory attributes, using the acceptance test with a hedonic scale (overall acceptance, aroma, color, flavor) and ideal test with a JAR scale (melting, hardness, sweet taste, bitter taste, aftertaste), both structured into 9 points.

Resultados e Discussão

The variation contained in the data (97.65%) was explained by principal component analysis (PCA), which showed that there was no separation of the 4 PBC and MBC into groups about the sensory attributes assessed, suggesting that all the chocolates were comparable and acceptable to each other. Even though there was no separation between the samples, the overall acceptance, aroma, and color attributes of the chocolates were correlated. Using one-way ANOVA and Tukey's statistical tests, it was observed that the MBC and fava bean PBC did not differ significantly from each other (p < 0.05) for most of the sensory attributes, with scores of 7 (Like moderately), 8 (Like very much), 4 (Slightly less just right) and 5 (Just about right). Lentil and sunflower PBC received the lowest scores for all the sensory attributes, while the pea PBC showed scores like those obtained by the fava bean PBC.

Conclusão

Overall, replacing milk with fava bean PBP followed by pea PBP in chocolates proved to be more promising considering consumers' sensory perception. However, future studies to assess the nutritional quality of these products are necessary to obtain a more complete approach to the subject.