Questionnaire: Molecular cooking

Authors: Manon DUGRE and Loïc LESOUARC'H

With this survey, we want to know which consumers can be interested in the practice and the tasting of molecular cooking according to their culinary profile (curiosity and investment for cooking).

We built our questionnaire to look for different profiles. We expected to find three groups: One made of people who do not like cooking and are not interested by molecular cooking, a second group composed of people who like cooking but cooking means tradition and not innovation, and so they do not like molecular cooking, and a last group curious and cook-loving, interested in novelty and attracted by molecular cooking

Our questionnaire (25 questions) was diffused by "Google document" to recover our data easily and to obtain different kinds of surveyed people (not only students and young people).
Our dataset was made of 108 persons and 48 variables.

We used first a Multiple Correspondence Analysis and we chose to study only the first two dimensions:

  • The first axis opposes the individuals who are attracted by molecular cooking, because of the frequent use of ingredients (agar-agar, colouring agents…), and the fact that they would like to cook dishes of molecular cooking, to those who are not interested and who are very weakly equipped for cooking
  • The second axis sets the individuals who invest in cooking (equipment, brands, time, budget, restaurant) to those who cannot or do not want to do it

Next, we performed a clustering and obtained three clusters:

  • The first cluster is not interested in molecular cooking at all. It generally does not know molecular cooking and is more traditional: people who belong to it go to classic restaurants and enjoy eating with their family. It is characterized in particular by the oldest people (more than 50 years old)
  • The second one is made of students between 18 and 25 years old who do not cook very much. They are interested in molecular cooking though, although they cannot help finding it weird and do not feel like cooking it
  • The third cluster is composed of people who are very open to innovation and who believe in molecular cooking. They enjoy cooking and spend quite a long time preparing their meal

Our analysis allowed to determine three different profiles. Their interest for molecular cooking is function of their position on the first axis and their granted means for cooking are function of their position on the second axis. So molecular cooking can interest persons who do not grant much for cooking but who are relatively open and accept novelty.

Find here the data set and the R script:

The results of the ENMCA() function are the following:

Beware the results of HCPC() and ENMCA() are not quite the same since the data are ventilated and the method of classification is a bit different.