Studies suggest that consumer' acceptance of edible insects can be enhanced by processing and blending them with familiar food products. This is however, expected to result in changes in some sensory attributes. In this study, we investigated how consumers evaluate the appropriateness of sensory attributes of a common bakery product (buns) that was blended with cricket-flour i.e., cricket-flour-containing (CFC) buns. We also tested whether provision of information can modulate the sensory evaluations, personal involvement and emotions. The study is based on a field experiment involving 432 participants drawn from rural communities in Kenya. Participants were randomly assigned to 3 information treatment groups: i) Control group - received only general information, ii) Treatment 1 – received general information and information about the benefits (i.e., positive attributes), iii) Treatment 2 – received general information and information about the potential drawbacks (i.e., negative attributes). Participants evaluated the CFC buns before and after tasting using Just-About-Right (JAR) scale. Results indicate that providing product information affected sensory evaluation of the product's sensory attributes. They also indicate that actual tasting of the CFC buns improved the convergence of sensory evaluation of the attributes towards the ideal level. Results further show that CFC buns elicited more positive feelings with little differences in the emotional profiles between the information treatments, which suggests general interest in the buns. These results provide useful insights on how to enhance consumer acceptance of insect-based foods. We discuss the implications of the findings.

研究表明，通过将食用昆虫与熟悉的食品加工并混合，可以提高消费者对食用昆虫的接受度。然而，预期这会导致某些感觉属性的改变。在这项研究中，我们调查了消费者如何评估与bakery粉即含粉（CFC）面包混合的普通烘焙产品（面包）的感官属性的适当性。我们还测试了提供信息是否可以调节感觉评估，个人参与和情绪。该研究基于一项现场实验，涉及来自肯尼亚农村社区的432名参与者。参与者被随机分为3个信息治疗组：i）对照组-仅收到一般信息，ii）治疗1 –收到有关益处的一般信息和信息（即正面属性），iii）治疗2 –收到有关潜在缺点的一般信息和信息（即负面属性）。参与者在品尝之前和之后使用Just-About-Right（JAR）量表评估了CFC面包。结果表明，提供产品信息会影响对产品感官属性的感官评估。他们还表明，实际品尝CFC包子可以使属性的感官评估朝着理想水平收敛。结果进一步表明，CFC s头引起了更多积极的感觉，而信息处理之间的情感特征差异很小，这表明人们普遍对general头感兴趣。这些结果为如何提高消费者对昆虫食品的接受度提供了有用的见解。我们讨论了发现的含义。