The Acceptability of Goat Milk to Young Japanese Adults

Abstract

Ozawa, T., Nishitani, J., Lopez-Villalobos, N. and Blair, H. 2008. The acceptability of goat milk to young Japanese adults. J. Appl. Anim. Res., 33: 113–116. For sensory evaluation of fresh goat milk, a sample of 58 students from the Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University were randomly and evenly divided into two groups as “Group I” and “Group II”. Only Group II received a 10-min lecture about the health benefits of goat milk. Bottles of commercial goat milk were used for the tasting. Each participant was offered 100 ml of fresh goat milk and was given the option to leave residual milk if the flavour was not considered to be satisfactory. Milk was graded for taste, smell, richness and overall evaluation. Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Chi-squared analyses and one-way analysis of variance were carried out to search for significant differences between the two groups. Overall, goat milk was found to be moderately acceptable to both groups of trial participants. However, the amount of residual milk was lower in Group II compared to Group I (P<0.05). Thus goat milk was moderately acceptable to young Japanese adults. In addition, promoting the health benefits of goat milk to consumers via written and verbal information can significantly increase the amount of goat milk consumption.