Another look at sensory data: How to “have your salmon and eat it, too!”

International audienceWho has never dreamt of having at the same time, in a single graphical display, a superimposed representation of consumers according to their preferences towards products they have tasted on the one hand and of the characteristics of the same products on the other hand? This paper proposes an alternative to the very well known internal preference mapping where consumers are depicted according to their preferences only. In this manner, the distance between two consumers is very natural and easy to interpret, and a clustering of the consumers is also very easy to obtain using a usual hierarchical clustering procedure performed on Euclidian distances with the Ward's minimum variance criterion. The originality of the representation we suggest is that the characteristics of the products are also superimposed on the scatter plot of consumers as suggested previously (see Fig. 1). Each one of these characteristics can be compared to a particular consumer who would score according to one and only one criterion. “Salt” as it is displayed in Fig. 1 on the very left can be assimilated to the archetype of the consumer who gives high scores when the products are salty and who gives low scores when they are not. As for the consumers, those who are close to that archetype would prefer salty products to non-salty products