# Polyphenolic Content and Sensory Characteristics of New Zealand Honey Ice Cream
## 3 Results and Discussion
### Consumer Testing of Honey Ice cream  
Consumer testing was conducted to evaluate the acceptability of ice creams formulated using different types of honey. A total of 54 participants (30 females and 24 males) aged between 18 and 65+ took part in the consumer testing, with the mean age of participants falling between 25 and 34 years old. The results of the one-way ANOVA analysis for overall liking, as well as liking of appearance, aroma, flavour, taste, and texture of the ice cream samples, are presented in Table 3. The ice cream sweetened with sucrose (control) received the highest ratings for overall liking and liking of appearance, aroma, flavour, taste, and texture. However, it is important to note that there were no significant differences in mean liking scores between sucrose and the native New Zealand honey varieties that included pohutukawa, rewarewa (except for taste), and kamaih (except for flavour and texture) ice cream samples. On the other hand, the ice cream made with thyme honey had significantly lowest ratings for overall liking and liking of appearance, aroma, flavour, taste, and texture, in comparison to the other ice cream samples such as bush, rewarewa, and kamaih in this study. Figure 1: Principal component analysis biplot of the phenolic content in the honey ice cream samples. The active vector variables are the polyphenols compounds, and the observation loadings are the honey samples. There were no significant differences in terms of liking of texture between most of the samples, except for kamahi and thyme, which had the significantly lowest liking of texture scores. Despite the rheology results in Supplementary Table S1 indicating significantly lower viscosity values for honey ice cream mixtures compared to sucrose-sweetened ice cream, the liking scores for texture of most honey ice creams were not significantly different from ice cream made with sucrose. The liking of texture was only significantly lower for thyme ice cream, which interestingly coincided with its lower viscosity. [PERSON] et al. (2008) [26] reported that sucrose ice cream had a higher viscosity compared to honey and honey/sucrose blend ice cream samples. This could be attributed to the viscosity and water content of honey itself, which was thick. Thyme honey on the other hand was a runnier honey compared to the other honey samples. This can be attributed to its higher water content, which reduced its viscosity. PCA was then conducted to gain a better understanding of the impact of using honey as a sweetener on the overall liking of the ice cream. The results are depicted in Figure 2, where the first two principal components explained 62.45% of the variance, with Factor 1 (F1) and Factor 2 (F2) accounting for 37.42% and 25.03% of the variance, respectively. The ice cream samples sweetened with pbutukawa and kamahi honey, as well as sucrose, received the highest scores along F1, aligning with the high overall liking scores shown in Table 3. Conversely, the ice cream sweetened with thyme honey, which had high negative scores along F1, corresponded to its low overall liking scores as shown in Table 3.  
Table 4 shows the overall sensory profile retrieved from consumers using CATA methodology. All attributes reached significance except for mouthcoating. In summary, sucrose showed the least significance compared to other honey samples in terms of floral characteristics. The honey ice cream that was significantly perceived to be possess the most honey attribute was pbutukawa, followed by kamahi, clover, and rewarewa. Fruity was least pronounced for the manuka bush and rewarewa samples. Interestingly, thyme honey ice cream showed significantly less creamy, and caramel compared to other samples. pbutukawa honey and sucrose ice cream was rated to be significantly the sweetest. Some of the honey samples were rated bitter by consumers, except for the sucrose ice cream. Additionally, vanilla was most pronounced in the sucrose ice cream.