Sensory panel leaders

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). 

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. 

For the panel leader, it means it is important to spend enough time on the selection and the definition of the attributes, so that the subjects are very comfortable in identilying the sensory perceptions and can be quick in selecting the sensation they perceive as dominant during the evaluation. In this way, the number of attributes should also not be too large, say about ten as mentioned before. 

Today, almost all sensory software programs offer the possibility to collect TDS data, and most have functionalities for data analyses. If it is not possible to have access to any of them, which could happen if the panel leader is out of his/her facilities, it is still possible to do TDS by hand simply by recording on a paper the sequence of the attributes (or codes related to each attribute to right them faster) and the time at which the dominance occurs using a stop watch. However, there are now many solutions to do deported TDS, i.e. sessions that can be run at home on a computer with an internet connection, on a tablet or a smartphone (e.g. with TimeSens, Fizz, EyeQuestion or Compusens). 

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