Snacking behavior studied by the ICE consortium

The Inside Consumer Experience project group is an international consortium of four partners, which develops novel instruments and mobile services for the objective measurement of food selection and consumption in real-life contexts. The project aims to take the concept of situational food-related research a major step further. The first edition of their newsletter with the latest news on methods and tools for consumer studies in the food sector, is now available online! This newsletter is the result of the first two years of the Inside Consumer Experience project group.

Pilot study
The Inside Consumer Experience project group carried out a pilot study to test new techniques to study behavior. The study took place at the Noldus headquarters in Wageningen (The Netherlands). Sixteen Noldus employees volunteered to participate. They were asked to eat either their regular breakfast (week 1) or a cereal breakfast (week 2) or vice versa. The test participants were informed that the pilot study aimed to study a new type of cereal but they did not know that it contained extra fibers. Fibers are important for satiety and it was hypothesized that after a high-fiber breakfast, feelings of satiety lasted longer. To test this hypothesis it was assessed how long the test participants could resist a candy box with chocolates which was placed on their desk at work.

To observe the test participants’ behavior, video recordings were made from the time they arrived at work till lunch time. As coding hours of video is very time-consuming, we tested a number of alternative, automatic methods to study the behavior. Read more about this pilot study on the project consortium's website.