Sensory Evaluation of Foods

Sensory evaluation is a science that measures, analyse, and interprets the reactions of people to products as perceived by the senses. Sensory analysis measures more than how a product looks, smells, feels and tastes. Sensory evaluation seeks feedback on a product’s texture, the sounds it makes and the other substances and products of which it reminds users. These qualities are often recorded on a spider graph, a graph that shows how a product scores in multiple categories.

With the growing demand of foods with convenient shelf life periods, the organoleptic quality of such foods becomes a priority for every food manufacturer. The product could have a desirable shelf life but if the product fails to maintain quality and acceptance with regards to its organoleptic characteristics, consumers will not prefer the same.

Apart from just offering shelf life studies, our team can now offer customers with sensory evaluation programs planned and implemented by a dedicated laboratory with skilled and professionally trained sensory analysts.

We can now offer an array of sensory tests such as:

• Discrimination Testing: Tests such as Triangle Tests, Paired Comparison, Tetrad, etc. can help to understand the effects of raw materials changes, new processes, and shelf-life.
• Descriptive Testing: These tests document the qualitative and quantitative sensory aspects of a product. The qualitative aspects of products include specific appearance, aroma, flavour, texture characteristics etc. The quantitative aspect is the intensities of each attribute.
• Acceptance Test/ Preference test/Rating Test/Ranking test: These tests are applied for better insight into how the product is seen by consumers.
• Sensory Shelf Life: Validates the length of time that a product will remain the same “acceptable quality” level or have “no change in desired sensory characteristics” over that entire life of a product.
   

The group of experts are carefully selected and trained to detect different flavor profiles, allowing us to evaluate products against specific criteria to optimize the formulation. We can offer three sets of sensory panel

• Trained
• Semi-Trained
• Consumer Panel 

We conduct specialized sensory studies tailored to industry-specific goals, at our state of the art laboratories situated in Pune and Bangalore.