Screening people for consumer testing

The researchers screen a group of people to see who has the strongest reaction to fishy flavours. They choose people who are most sensitive to fishy flavours to do the sensory testing of the omega-3 products. Once they’ve chosen a group of people, they train them to use similar words, or descriptors, for the flavours before doing the tasting.

Transcript

Amit Taneja (

To actually find out if the ice cream had any fishy odours or taste coming out, we also use descriptive analysis, which is really using a group of people who could pick fishy flavours, fishy odours easily and then training them. I would screen a group of people and only choose the ones which are sensitive to fishy taste and fishy odour. And that is done by just giving them a few samples of increasing intensity of fishiness. And some people might not pick it, and the others will be very sensitive and they will say “Yuck” or “I can't consume that”. They will be the ideal panellists for tasting omega-3 products. So this is how we do it, so screening first, and we train them on specific terms, and then we go onto actual tasting, which started off with coming up with a list of words which they were comfortable with and which were present in the ice cream, like creaminess or fishy odour, fishy taste, things like that. And then they were given different samples which tasted of those sort of characteristics, and then further down the line, they were given the actual ice cream samples and they sort of judged it based on those descriptors.