Consumer Perceptions of Flavor for Colored Bell Pepper

Consumer concerns about decreasing food safety and food budgets have spawned a revival in home gardening.  Colored bell peppers are more expensive in the market than green bell peppers, although produced identically.  Growing colored bell peppers in the home garden may provide savings in the household food budget.  The objective of this study was to evaluate the visual acceptability, perceived flavor acceptability, as well as actual flavor preference of colored bell peppers.   Peppers were grown in a high tunnel at the Beaumont Horticultural Unit using commercial production standards. Two consumer-based sensory panels (n=120) were conducted to evaluate the acceptability of six bell pepper cultivars. For the visual appearance test, each panelist was presented with a tray containing 6 labeled whole peppers.  Panelists were asked to evaluate each whole pepper based on appearance, and how acceptable they thought the flavor of the sample would be based on appearance of the whole bell pepper. Each panelist was then asked to evaluate bell pepper strips for appearance, aroma, texture, flavor, and overall acceptability.  A 9-point hedonic scale (1=dislike extremely; 9=like extremely) was used to score responses for both visual appearance and consumer acceptance tests. Fisher’s Protected Least Significant Difference test was utilized to separate main effect treatment means when significant differences occurred among treatments. The cultivar ‘Colossal’ was the most preferred pepper based on visual appearance alone.   ‘Colossal’ is a commercial cultivar which sets green fruit which eventually turns to red, a familiar color combination for consumers. ‘Valencia’, a green to orange cultivar was also liked by the panelists.  Panelists’ perceived flavor acceptability, based on visual appearance alone, closely correlated to appearance acceptability.  When panelists were presented with strips independent of whole peppers, ratings given for visual appearance of the strips did not follow the same order as ratings for the whole peppers.  ‘Valencia’ was found to be significantly more visually acceptable than the other cultivars.  In terms of aroma, ‘Tequila’ ranked significantly higher than the other cultivars, but did not score well for appearance and perceived flavor acceptability.  This may be a result of its unusual fruit color, ranging from lilac to mottled.   Flavor acceptability among cultivars ranged from 6.0 to 6.7 with no significant standouts.  The texture of ‘Valencia’ and ‘Colossal’ were most preferred and also received high scores for overall acceptability when all traits were combined.  The least preferred cultivars were yellow-fruited ‘Sirius’ and ‘Super Heavy Weight’.