As the need for ideal product understanding becomes more
important in the food industry, methods which directly measure
ideals have been introduced (Issanchou, 2009; Meullenet, Xiong,
& Findlay, 2007). The Just About Right (JAR) method, in which consumers are asked to rate a product’s intensity relative to their ideal,
uses an implicit ideal. In this case, consumers are asked to indicate
– for a number of attributes – if the product they tasted is Just
About Right, too little/much or far too little/much compared to
their personal ideal product. When consumers can express the difference of the perceived intensity from an implicit ideal, it is assumed that they have a good representation and understanding
of their personal ideal, and can rate it directly (Ideal Profile method). In this method, consumers are asked to rate both the perceived
and the ideal intensities for each attribute and each product. At the
end of a session, each consumer, who tested P products, will yield P
perceived and P ideal intensities for each attribute