Multicriteria Techniques (AHP and TOPSIS) for Reducing Emotion and Memory Vocabularies in Coffee Consumer for Remote and Sensory Laboratory Studies

The aim of this research was to apply MCTs, Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), to reduce the EsSense25 and MemVOC vocabularies and evaluate them with coffee consumers in remote and sensory laboratory contexts. In the first stage, coffee experts evaluated both vocabularies to generate reduced lists. In the second stage, the response time for complete and reduced lists was analyzed using a pilot group of consumers. Finally, in the third stage, the complete and reduced lists were applied to coffee consumers in remote and laboratory contexts using the check-all-that-apply (CATA) technique, and their correlation was evaluated through Multiple factor analysis (MFA). The results showed that with AHP, the EsSense25 and MemVOC lists were reduced to 10 emotions and 11 memories, while TOPSIS yielded 16 emotions and 15 memories. Significant differences were found in response times between contexts and lists. In the remote context, the evaluation of the complete list took 340 s, while the reduced lists by TOPSIS and AHP required 244 and 160 s, respectively. In the sensory laboratory, the response time for the complete list was 485.8 s, while the reduced lists required 236.3 s for TOPSIS and 131.4 s for AHP, respectively. The correlation between complete and reduced lists ranged from 0.63 to 0.76 in the remote context and from 0.81 to 0.87 in the sensory laboratory. It is concluded that MCTs are an efficient alternative to reduce extensive lists of emotions and memories based on expert opinions, facilitating rapid and effective evaluations with consumers.