Sensory Acceptability and Nutritional Content of Cereal Bars Formulated with Adlay (Coix lacryma-jobi L.) Grains

In the Philippines, an underutilized crop known as adlay has been found to contain valuable nutritive potential. Given Filipinos’ usual diet of snacks and ready-to-eat food items, the study aimed to provide an alternative choice for healthy snacks by utilizing adlay in developing cereal bars with an improved nutritional profile. The study developed cereal bars using varying proportions of oats and adlay grains as follows: control (100:0), treatment 1 (75:25), treatment 2 (50:50), and treatment 3 (25:75). The cereal bars were then subjected to sensory evaluation to determine their acceptability using a nine-point hedonic scale with 67 adult respondents. The control and the most acceptable treatment then underwent proximate and mineral analyses (iron and calcium). The sensory data was analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis H-Test with rank analysis, whereas the proximate and mineral content data were analyzed using the student’s t-test at p<0.05. Results showed no significant difference between the control and all the treatments regarding sensory characteristics, and treatment 1 got the highest rank among all treatments. Proximate and mineral analyses revealed that treatment 1 has significantly higher crude protein (11.25 ± 0.66%), crude fiber (10.79 ± 1.22%), crude fat (17.82 ± 1.10%), and calcium (1.08 ± 0%), than the control made of pure oats. The findings, therefore, suggest that adlay can be used as a value-added ingredient in making sensory-acceptable cereal bars with an improved nutritional profile.