Food online shopping can have several drawbacks. Among them, the gap between what is on the screen and what you get at home is a major issue and can cause waste of time and product returns.
This project aims at improving the way an online shop could transmit the sensory properties of products to the final customers when the real products are not available.

We tested 3 means of representation of the products that would be usable online:
- Photos of the crisps’ packaging;
- Anonymous pictures and films of the crisps;
- Anonymous identity cards and global mapping of the crisps.

The descriptive vocabulary (11 terms selected among 103 generated) and the mapping of the products were obtained using a quick descriptive method, during 2 sessions with 13 students: the flash profiling.
We used the results of the profiling to limit the next part of the study to 6 products among the initial 11.

3 groups of 21 consumers, one per virtual representation of the products, took part in the study. For each group, the first task used as a control, was to match 8 products (2 different replicates) with the 6 references.
Then, they had to run the same task between the real crisps and their virtual representations.

Among other things, the study allowed us to improve the way to construct the mapping of the products.

virtual representation; matching task;