One of the most challenging aspects of sensory evaluation is creating a large and consistent consumer panelist database. This can be a time consuming and costly process as you would need a large enough demographic area in order to fill out your consumer panels. Making the most out of social media is always a good option, but the exact target audience may be difficult to get a hold of. Another possibility is to go to the physical places where your consumer base gathers and actively recruit. While Virtual Reality, a current hot topic in consumer research, is a way to bring the outside world to a controlled location on premises, the use of mobile laboratories is a way to bring the sensory laboratory to the outside world.
Whilst Puratos used their Sensobus and Sensovan to gather data in Europe and Northern America, their version of a mobile sensory lab in the Asia-Pacific region is the Sensobox. This mobile sensory and analysis laboratory is used to collect consumer preference data at the various product location shopping malls across Asia. The Sensobox is easy to set up and is ideal to test out specific concept and product ideas as their target audience is already present in the set-up location. This mobile testing lab is equipped with six tasting booths as well as a small kitchen that is used to prepare the to-be-tested products.
When collecting data outside the sensory laboratory, it might not always be possible to collect the data online. Therefore we have two applications which allow offline data collection, EyeQuestion Live and EyeQuestion Mobile. You can find more information about EyeQuestion Live in our previous blog EyeQuestion Live on the road.
EyeQuestion Mobile allows you to upload projects to the EyeQuestion Mobile app. Once the projects are uploaded to the app on the mobile devices, it is possible to run the questionnaire offline. As soon as the mobile devices connect to the internet again, the answers will be submitted and uploaded to the server where the data can be downloaded and analyzed. We are proud and glad to see that EyeQuestion Live is being used to help Puratos gather data from more then 15 countries on their mobile sensory labratories.
