Non-verbal evaluation of acceptance of insect-based products using a simple and holistic analysis of facial expressions

A Multisensor Data Fusion Approach for Predicting Consumer Acceptance of Food Products

“…To this day, the best reference for rating observed emotions is human assessment, which is still prone to misclassifications [33] even with proper training [50], because emotion recognition is context-dependent [33,47] and thus relies heavily on a cognitional understanding of the situation in which an emotion is produced. On top of that, in experiments similar to ours [6,32], consumers showed almost no facial gestures, even for acute stimuli [2], and some expressions proposed as innate were rarely observed [51]. All of this might explain why our FER approach, as well as similar ones constantly detected just a couple of emotions.…”

“…Moreover, changes in facial expression are harder to determine when tasting food products, compared to smelling a perfume or watching a video [25], since the jaw movement produced by chewing and the occasional facial occlusion (because of the hand that takes the sample to the mouth) are often the cause of misreading in FER algorithms. These might be some of the reasons why similar studies seem inconclusive [7,31,32].…”

Emerging trends in European food, diets and food industry

“…Several authors analysed the consumers' behaviour toward the consumption of insect-based food, exploring the main barriers and the potential drivers for this novel food products (Tan et al 2016;Caparros et al 2014;Verbeke, 2015;Piha et al, 2016). The main findings reveal that cultural background and individual experiences play an important role on consumers acceptance (Tan et al, 2014), that consumers are higher willingness to eat the processed insect-based foods compared to the unprocessed foods (Hartmann et al 2015); that the social acceptance for these new foods is higher when consumers had experience with insect food and when they are incorporated into familiar food items (Hamerman, 2015;le Goff & Delarue, 2016), that the type of communication influences the willingness to eat insect as food and that emotional effect deriving from the view and the contact of the insect product influence the willingness to try it in order to reduce the impact of these foods out of our cultural framework (Baselice et al 2016). Further studies are required to better explore the barrier of prejudices towards insect food and to reduce the visual impact in order to improve the willingness to accept and buy this novel food.…”

Assessing the Role of Food Related Lifestyle in Predicting Intention towards Edible Insects

“…Thus, convincing an insect phobic culture to recognise the relevance of insects for sustainable food supply chains is not only a matter of sustainable production but also of stimulating consumer demand by increasing their acceptance. In the last few years, scholars investigated Westerners’ willingness to accept and adopt insect-based food [ 26 , 27 , 28 ] or their willingness to substitute meat products with insects [ 29 , 30 ], usually in connection to factors such as food neophobia [ 18 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ], disgust sensitivity [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ], previous consumption [ 31 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 ], indirect measures as implicit associations [ 47 ] and other general characteristics such as demographic [ 28 ] and general or food-related attitudes [ 48 , 49 ]. Topics such as risk perception, health concern, and social representation of insects as food [ 50 , 51 , 52 ] are still little explored.…”