We are only provided with menu picture and name at a shop or a restaurant. For people who have extreme aversion to novel tastes, getting them to consume novel foods requires costly nutrition programs or policies. I tried to build a food kiosk that disseminates universal flavor information with a multisensory design.
I have chosen an unfamiliar food item that is also healthy and antioxidant, a turmeric latte, designed a novel sensory workshop to extract necessary design requirements, and observed unfamiliar food flavor perceptions.
Ingredient Exposure was devised as the user touches each presented ingredient. For audio stimulation, it was transmitted through embedded speakers, tactile through molding texture, and olfactory diffused through Arduino humidifier module.
Multiple sensory modalities implemented into everyday food selection process
Sensory workshop, Interface design, Experimental study, Mechanical prototyping, Quantitative & qualitative Analysis
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Eunsol Choi, Younah Kang (corresponding author)
Those who present repulsion toward unfamiliar foods are food neophobic. Without invoking the distress of trying the food, prior exposure to non-tasting introduction leads to a smoother transition and a higher willingness to try, especially given that the hardest trait in food neophobia is to get to try the food.
Two design majors and two food and nutrition majors who have no food allergies to the item and its ingredients—turmeric, cinnamon, honey, ginger, and milk—were recruited for the workshop. They were engaged in one session each, two people at a time, and spent around 45 to 60 minutes completing the worksheet.
After the participants completed all workshop sessions, modalities were collected and organized according to the design requirements. The multisensorial modalities of a novel food item were devised on a kiosk machine.
Using Framer for the kiosk visual and on-screen interactions, I designed food selection to select the menu and start the individual ingredient exploration. The visual attributes include the menu picture, menu name, ingredient selection buttons and pictures.
To implement olfactory modalities, fragrance oils from Nature In Flavor Co., Ltd. were utilized to match each ingredient’s smell attributes, which were then diffused by planting an Arduino humidifier module.
With the extracted auditory modalities, I designed a sound file with the associated music, food sound, and the sound of its origin to play upon selection. The kiosk machine’s embedded speaker automatically played upon selection.
Tactile stimulations were formulated through modeling clays, resin, and appropriate ornamental components, each fixed with a tact switch attached to the pertinent ingredient.
The experiment was a between-subject design, consisting of three experimental conditions according to the interface type (control, audio-visual, multisensorial). The experiment was situated in a local expo in South Korea, an open space with guests visiting the expo for sight-seeing.
After entering the booth, participants were told that they were to evaluate a drink called ‘turmeric latte’. They were then asked to complete a three-question questionnaire on their baseline familiarity with the drink, liked tastes, and disliked tastes. After the experiment, participants were given out a post-experience questionnaire on the endline familiarity, satisfaction level, and willingness to try the drink.
There was a total of 91 participants (female = 58), of which 32 were the control, 26 were the audio-visual, and 33 were the multisensorial groups. The age of the participants varied between 4 and 70 years old, with a mean of 33±14.8 years, 34±15.9 years, and 31±16.7 years 13 old in respective groups. Out of them, 47% (n = 43) exhibited food neophobia, knowing a score of 38.6 or above is considered neophobic.
The experiment was a between-subject design, consisting of three experimental conditions according to the interface type (control, audio-visual, multisensorial). The experiment was situated in a local expo in South Korea, an open space with guests visiting the expo for sight-seeing.
The baseline results showed that most participants in all groups were unaccustomed
to the food item, showing an overall mean of 1.5±1.0 out of 6. After conducting paired t-tests on food
familiarity baseline and post-experiment endline data, while the control group had no statistical
significance in the
improvement of food familiarity (𝜌 = 0.091), the audio-visual group presented a significantly high
improvement of food familiarity (𝜌 = 0.001), and so did the multisensorial group (𝜌 0.0001).
ANOVA showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the
willingness to try the novel item between at least two groups (F(2,88) = [4.663], 𝜌 = 0.012). Tukey’s
HSD test for multiple comparisons revealed that the multisensorial interface elicited a greater intent
to try the food than did the control interface, with a significant difference (Tukey’s post hoc test 𝜌
= 0.009, 95% C.I. = [0.190,1.631]).
Qualitative analysis was performed on the full interview data after transcription, emotional adjective assessment, and the ranked sensory intensity. The data were then sorted and coded through thematic grouping. All interfaces and their characteristics are collectively shown in the table below.
