that it was the only biscuit with no extra ingredient in the fatreduced
variants.
Crispiness was the first perception scale given to subjects, so
they could familiarise themselves with this scale before rating
sweetness and fat perception. It also permitted subjects to focus
on other perceptions besides sweetness and fat. Furthermore, we
wanted to know if the reductions in sugar and/or fat content would
change the textural perception of biscuits. Previous studies showed
that sugar and fat reduction has important structural and textural
consequences on biscuits (Maache-Rezzoug et al., 1998; Pareyt
et al., 2009). Our results revealed that fat reduction did not affect
crispiness in the biscuits studied. For sugar reduction, it only had
an effect on one biscuit for which sugar-reduced variants were perceived
as less crispy than the standard biscuit.
Drewnowski et al. (1998) also observed that there was no systematic
link between fat reduction and texture-related attributes;
rather, it was dependent on the type of biscuit. This could be due to
three reasons. First, the structural and textural consequences of
sugar or fat reduction described by Pareyt et al. (2009) and
Maache-Rezzoug et al. (1998) were only measured by instruments.
Perhaps these modifications are not perceptible by humans, especially
when products are tested by consumers and not by an expert
sensory panel. Second, the results may also be related to the choice
of the descriptor of texture. Crispiness was chosen because all of
the biscuits in the present study were crispy dry biscuits. However,
for each type of biscuit, there is no difference concerning crispiness
but perhaps we should have observed other textural differences if
we had studied other textural descriptors. Third, for B and C Biscuits,
the crispiness stability of the (F-) and (F- -) variants, compared
to the standard biscuits, could also be due to the addition