Abstract

Through crowdsourcing and open innovation, product manufacturers are exploiting digital technologies to communicate with their consumers, drawing on the crowd to propose new products and designs. The food industry has struggled with adopting this model due to the lack of an effective language around the taste and texture of food. Existing sensory vocabularies are complex and target food professionals instead of consumers. To address this, we created a new consumer-centred sensory vocabulary aimed at underpinning future crowdsourcing platforms for open innovation in food manufacturing, with a focus on cake.