2. Materials and methods
2.1. Participants
In this study, we focused on families with at least one child. This
is our main recruitment criteria. Participants had to be responsible
for grocery shopping and storage in their household.
For this observational study, we selected a total of 20 untrained
volunteers (7 men, 13 women; aged between 31 and 60
(Mean = 49.5, Std = 7.4)). All participants owned a twocompartment
family refrigerator. Half of the participants were
high school graduates while the other half had a college degree.
The households comprised three persons for ten participants and
four persons or more for the other ten (Mean = 3.65, Std = 0.75).
For thirteen of them, there was at least one child under 18 in the
household (Mean = 1.53, Std = 0.66).
As the participants were all employees at the AgroParisTech
center (Massy, France), they were chosen among the administrative
staff and therefore had no extensive knowledge of food
science, microbiology or quality control.