Course:FNH200/Lessons/Lesson 03/Page 03.3
3.3 Sensory Science: Sensory Evaluation of Foods
Sensory evaluation is a scientific discipline using human subjects to evaluate food based on the sensation perceived by senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Trained and untrained panellists can be used and simple to complex statistical analysis will be used to interpret the results. Systematic and scientific sensory evaluation was initiated during the world wide war to provide palatable food for troops and later developed into more advanced and scientific discipline and serving the economic interests of companies.
Sensory evaluation of foods is widely used in the food industry as an important tool for: new product development, product matching, shelf-life studies, product reformulation, quality control, and consumer preference, among others.
There are 3 main types of sensory tests (methods) used (Figure 3.4): Discriminative and Descriptive analyses (both of which are product-oriented and analytical), and the Hedonic/Preference/Acceptability tests (which are people-oriented and considered as "affective").
