What does it mean to check-all-that-apply? Four case studies with beverages

•CATA questions are popular in product-focused consumer research on foods and beverages.•This research investigated CATA questions for sensory product characterisation by consumers.•Open-ended questions provided insights to consumers decisions to select, or not, a CATA term.•Evidence was obtained of consumers’ ability to accurately perform sensory characterisation tasks.•Increases in stimulus intensity were appropriately captured through higher frequency of term use. The use of check-all-that-apply (CATA) questions in product-focused consumer research on foods and beverages is now common, and the method is known to provide valid sensory product characterisations. Extensive methodological research has been conducted and has supported uptake, but understanding of how consumers complete CATA questions is incomplete, particularly with regard to their decision to select or not a term to describe the sensory properties of products. The present research was situated within this gap, and using open-ended questions participants (n = 636) were asked to describe how they perceived a pair of samples with regard to an attribute and link this to CATA term selection. The results, obtained for taste (‘sweet’ and ‘sour/acidic’) and flavour (‘cinnamon’ and ‘smoky’) confirmed consumers’ ability to accurately perform sensory characterisation tasks. In particular, it was found that: i) the great majority of the consumers accurately used the CATA terms for describing the sensory characteristics they perceived in a sample, ii) when a term was not selected for describing samples, the majority of the consumers indicated that the corresponding sensory attribute was not perceived, iii) when a term was selected for describing only one of the samples in a pair, consumers reported to have perceived a difference in attribute intensity between the samples. Thus, CATA questions remain a desirable option for sensory product characterisation tasks with consumers, but should be selected with thought as they may not always be able to achieve desired sample discrimination due to the binary nature of the responses.