Sensory expert panellists

Sensory panel leaders provide sensory expert panellists with appropriate training in order to efficiently capture relevant sensory descriptive information. They are responsible for the maintenance of the quality of the data and the motivation of the sensory expert panellists by monitoring their performance and retraining them as often as necessary. For each project, sensory panel leaders adapt the process of evaluation according to the food product characteristics (i.e. temperature of consumption, palate cleansing methods, break duration, etc). 

Finally, in the context of new flavonr development, the sensory expert panellists would for example have to assess the flavour profile of selected market products, in order to highlight what flavonr directions already exist and what the possible gaps are. 

For the sensory support to be helpful an effective translation must be ensured between what a sensory expert panellist means and what the flavourist understands (for instance what colour pigment corresponds to bright purple Are there several pigments involved ). And this can only be achieved thanks to a strong collaboration between both functions. 

All Givaudan sensory expert panellists are trained, and constantly retrained, on Sense It language to ensure relevant sensory outcomes. 

The challenge is that, whereas sensory expert panellists can take time to train themselves, flavourists cannot afford to spend such amount of their resources to correctly learn the complete Sense If language, or even the most important lexicons. 

The QFP has been developed at Givaudan (Stampanoni, 1993) as an enhancement of the QDA . The QFP technique uses sensory expert panellists to identify... 

During the language generation session(s), sensory expert panelhsts blind taste every product of the set and determine which of the Sense references are needed to describe all the flavour characteristics of the product space. This step is at first individually performed in the sensory booths to enable an optimal focus from the sensory expert panelhsts. It is evenmally discussed by the team of sensory expert panellists, in order to achieve a consensual hst of descriptors, which will be reviewed and finalised in the training step. 

Flavourists are invited to attend the language generation step of QFPs and observe how sensory expert panellists build the Sense It descriptor list. They are strongly advised to smell or taste every Sense It reference that is discussed within the session. They may communicate questions to the sensory panel leader in charge of the sensory test, who will then check the answers with the sensory expert panellists. Indeed, they do not actively participate in the discussion, in order to prevent any bias of the sensory expert panellists perception. 

Observation of the sensory expert panellists ways of working makes the flavourists also aware that each piece of sensory descriptive information must always be linked to the set of products that was evaluated within a sensory test. Sensory scores of intensity are relative to the context of the product space and must not be taken as absolute scores. Indeed, even if the contrast and convergence effects (Amerine et al., 1965) are minimised by the balanced or randomised order of presentation of the samples in every sensory test, they are never totally eliminated. 

In some cases, Sense is not sufficient for sensory expert panellists to desalbe specific flavour characteristics. Listening to sensory expert panellists issues, flavourists may quickly propose new physical references to fill Sense If language gaps and avoid any delays in the completion of the sensory test. 

A group of flavourists and a team of sensory expert panellists perform in-parallel sensory evaluations. The generated data are analysed and compared by sensory scientists. 

Nevertheless, a drawback exists in this strategy. It is often difficult to extract insightful language information out of this type of comparison. The mental process used by flavourists when they perform sensory evaluations is very different from that used by sensory expert panellists. As explained previously, flavourists use an... 

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