Between Tradition and Innovation: Consumer Responses to Portuguese Traditional and Vegetarian Ready Meals During Repeated Exposure
Repeated exposure (RE) is widely recognised as an important mechanism shaping how consumer acceptance of foods evolves over time, as responses may change due to factors such as increasing familiarity or monotony, making long-term exposure experiments particularly relevant for identifying potential shifts in product acceptance and market success. This perspective is especially relevant for vegetarian meals, which are often promoted for their environmental and health benefits. Nevertheless, consumers may still experience difficulties integrating these products into everyday diets and often continue to prefer animal-based meals. Therefore, this study examined how consumer evaluations of three vegetarian ready meals and three Portuguese traditional ready meals evolve over a nine-week RE experiment. A balanced incomplete block design was implemented in a nine-week RE study involving 96 couples, conducted in participants’ usual eating environments. Each participant consumed one assigned vegetarian meal and one assigned traditional meal per week, with the same pair maintained throughout the study. Evaluations were completed using mobile-based assessments before and after consumption, including perceived hunger, overall liking, perceived satiety, open comments and meal composition. In addition, five sessions were conducted at the sensory lab, where one member of each couple evaluated all meals in terms of overall liking, willingness to consume, open comments and concept associations.
The 9-week analysis showed a globally stable pattern across products. Hunger increased slightly over time, with a significant time effect, but no product effect or product×time interaction. Liking did not change significantly across time, but differed between products, with tuna and Bolognese showing the highest scores, while curry had the lowest. Satiety also increased slightly over time and varied by product, with a near-significant product×time interaction. Overall, tuna showed the best performance, combining the highest values for liking and satiety and indicating the most favourable consumer response across the study period.
Publish date 2026-08-11
Author(s) Ana Boticas, João Pedro Marques, Joana Ferreira, Joana Pires, Rita Ramos, Célia Rocha, Rui Costa Lima, José Carlos Ribeiro, Bruna Barbosa, Maria João Alegria, Luís Miguel Cunha
