Robot versus human barista: Comparison of volatile compounds and consumers' acceptance, sensory profile, and emotional response of brewed coffee.

The increasing trend of integrating robots into the food industry has sparked debates regarding their potential influence on consumer attitudes toward food technology. This study investigated volatile compound profiles via gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), consumer acceptability, sensory profiling, and emotional responses of consumers toward coffee samples brewed by robot and human baristas. Moreover, the effect of the robot experience on food technology neophobia (FTN) was investigated. The principal component analysis of the volatile compound profiles revealed that the samples by the robot barista exhibited a higher degree of similarity compared to those prepared by the human barista. The range of relative standard deviations of volatile compounds from the robot barista brewed coffee was 1.4-83.1% and the variation was smaller than that of the human barista, which was 5.0-118.3%. Participants had a significant decrease in FTN scores after evaluating the robot-brewed coffee (p < 0.05), but there was no significant difference in FTN scores before and after evaluating the coffee brewed by the human barista (p > 0.05). Sensory evaluation studies revealed no significant differences in acceptability ratings and purchase intentions between the two groups (p > 0.05). However, emotional responses to the coffee samples significantly varied, with the robot-brewed coffee inducing more dynamic and positive emotions and the human-brewed coffee inducing more static and positive emotions (p < 0.05). Overall, this study provides valuable insights into consumer attitudes toward food robot service to humans and indicates that consumer's experience with food robots may significantly reduce FTN (p < 0.001).

Effects of milk type and consumer factors on the acceptance of milk among Korean female consumers.

Despite an overall increase in the consumption of milk products, the consumption of plain processed milk in South Korea is decreasing. One of the major reasons for this phenomenon is that consumers in Korea find the taste of plain milk unpalatable. The principal objective of this study was to identify the internal and external drivers of liking for milk among Korean consumers. The results of descriptive analysis (Chung and others 2008) were correlated to the results of consumer taste tests to identify the sensory characteristics that positively and negatively affect consumers' liking of milk. Consumers' health and food-related attitudes were surveyed as well as their daily milk consumption patterns to investigate the effects of these attitudes and consumption patterns on the liking for various types of milk. Consumers' liking of milk samples was positively correlated with sweetness, sweet cream flavor, and smooth texture. Grassy odor, raw milk flavor, artificial milk flavor, and rancid flavor were the negative drivers of liking. Consumers who frequently drink plain processed milk, in particular, preferred the UHT-processed whole milk samples, whereas infrequent drinkers preferred lactose-free milk samples. Consumers with strong food neophobic tendency significantly rated lower than consumers with weak tendency for most of the liking categories and some of the attribute intensities. Finally, when the consumers were grouped based on their common preference for milk samples, plain processed milk consumption frequency was the major determinant affecting the preference for milk.