Abstract The regular consumption of fish provides health gains for people, and its introduction in school meals is an important strategy to insert the habit of consuming this food by a population. Thus the objective of this study was to verify the acceptance of fish, presented in the form of hamburger, by children in municipal primary schools in the town of Pato Branco, Brazil, in which the school cooks had been trained to produce fish hamburgers. Acceptance was evaluated using a hedonic scale with 5 facial classifications (1 = disliked extremely to 5 = liked extremely). Students of both genders from 5 to 10 years of age (n = 142) were served the hamburgers for their midday meal, representing the protein portion of the meal. The results were analyzed by logistic regression. No effect of age or gender was observed between the children in the acceptance of the hamburgers, but the interaction between age and gender was significant. The cluster analysis was applied to distinguish this interaction using two-way joining to present the results, which showed the effect between specific age and gender situations. The acceptance index was 87% showing the potential for the consumption of this food by children.

Abstract The objective of this paper is to develop a fish-based product. Through the innovative sensorial check all that apply (CATA) technique, employed in two stages of the development of the product – market research and the sensorial and hedonistic characterization of the final product – the aim was to develop a fish by-product that could respond to the needs of the consumer market. Results showed that the CATA technique is an important instrument for researching the consumer market and indicated the kind of fish by-product to be developed and its desired features. Nugget was the resulting by-product. The second application of CATA made possible the sensorial description of the by-product as being crisp, with little fish odor, light in color, well-seasoned and tasty. Therefore, the CATA technique proved to be an important research instrument in the fish consumption market as well as a quick technique for the complete description of fish nuggets.