Abstract
Cultivar portfolio decisions and postharvest quality management in Kazakhstani fresh apple markets are made without locally validated consumer sensory benchmarks, limiting producers’ and breeders’ ability to align product design with regional consumer expectations. This exploratory study develops and pilot-tests a consumer sensory evaluation framework for fresh apple cultivars among young adults in an urban Kazakhstani context. Twenty-eight untrained adults evaluated firmness, crispness, juiciness, mealiness, sweetness, acidity, and aroma, alongside overall liking, using a 100 mm unstructured line scale, with reference-based calibration and triangle discrimination tests. Discrimination accuracy was high (96.4%; p < 0.001; d′ = 2.59), with no evidence of systematic anchoring bias, though this cannot be fully ruled out given the study design. Significant cultivar differences were observed for seven attributes (p < 0.01), with aroma showing no significant variation (p = 0.265). Crispness (⍴ = 0.44), sweetness (⍴ = 0.43), and juiciness (⍴ = 0.41) were the attributes most strongly and positively associated with overall liking, while mealiness exerted a negative influence (⍴ = −0.36). Exploratory factor analysis revealed three latent sensory dimensions—texture, taste, and aroma—explaining 71.22% of variance. Sex-based differences were limited to mealiness, acidity, and aroma. Given the small sample size and the absence of instrumental physicochemical measurements, these findings should be interpreted as exploratory and hypothesis-generating rather than definitive. As one of the first consumer sensory evaluation frameworks piloted in a Kazakhstani population, this study provides preliminary insights and a methodological foundation for future, larger-scale research on cultivar selection, postharvest management, and consumer-oriented product development.