Modelling strawberry quality in a longitudinal study under the marketing concept of branding

BACKGROUND: Marketing strategies, such as branding, redefine how consumers perceive quality and create new requirements related to season length and quality homogeneity, among others. For short-day (SD) strawberry cultivar brands, the commercial season is short due to a dependency on temperature and photoperiod. A plausible strategy to extend the commercialization period is to use different varieties within a single brand; however, this has led to inconsistent quality in other fruit crops. A form of quality assessment to evaluate the impact of a multi-varietal brand on sensory quality is a critical longitudinal study with several sources of variability, such as the inherent variation among assessors and fruit replicates that can affect the reliability of the results. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a methodology to assess the sensorial and physicochemical quality of strawberry brands in two contexts: a short-term season composed of two SD cultivars and a long-term season with one SD and one day-neutral (DN) cultivar. RESULTS: New statistical models are proposed in this study. An ANOVA mixed model with assessors and replicates as random terms and a multiple factor analysis highlighted a lack of homogeneity with regard to texture parameters and sourness, while partial least square models identified aroma and sweetness as the best quality indicators. CONCLUSIONS: This work has successfully illustrated a methodology that is capable of handling critical aspects of longitudinal studies by using univariate models that account for different sources of variability and constrained multivariate models to relate parameters with overall liking. A long-term brand is a viable solution to valorise strawberries, as parameter heterogeneity did not affect overall quality.