Sensory evaluation training

I need to prepare a sensory evaluation training for R&D and QA teams.
I was part of a trained pannel but I don’t have experience training teams.
Do you have bibliography to share to support my presentation?
Any other suggestions wil be useful as well.

Training should be combination of theory and practice. So you havd to attend actual training from a qualified and recognized institution for such.
Among the study material to be familiarized

  1. Descriptive Sensory analysis in practice
    2.Sensory Evaluation Practice
  2. Sensory and consumer research in Food products development.
  3. Statistical analysis of sensory data.

Dear Vic,
Try slideshare and enter different methods of sensory evaluation.
Study 2-3 slides you will get idea and get support from here If still Required.

What specifically are you training them for? Will it be descriptive sensory on in-house products? General sensory evaluation methods? Fault detection?

Hi Michael. The objective of the training is to describe the standard characteristics of in-house products.
Therefore QA shoul be capable of detect and describe non standard products. So they should lern to differentiate between descriptors and use intensity scales

Will these be full scale trained panels in-house or are you training them more quickly to just be able to easily identify product anomalies in several products?
The training would be similar of course but the screening of judges and the number of replications for the tests would be increased for a formal descriptive panel.

As a first step I want to give them basics tools to begin with the implementation ASAP. I think a 5 points scale will be enough at this instance.
The judges will be the R&D team (3 people) and the QA team (2 people). This is a small plantel teamwork so I can´t refuse any judge at this instance.

2010_Book_SensoryEvaluationOfFood
Bulky for urgent reading but useful.

Usually with a project like this I will look for any current info on similar products. ie: has a lexicon already been developed.
If not then the lexicon would be first on the list.
After that, you need to define what constitutes positive and negative attributes in the product and which definitions from the lexicon apply.
Then you would create control samples and samples with attributes that would be expected from non-ideal product, describe and compare them and their differences. Use your hedonic scales to correlate the descriptive responses.
This would be replicated several times to make sure your judges are consistent in their evaluations.

Do anybody know how to use Xlstats.

IIRC that’s statistical software that uses Excel based interface and addins… I used to have an old copy of that in the early year 2000…but not able to familiarize with it as I got trained in MInitab

Is it only Minitab you use in your sensory data study and you have some other tools

There is the Camo Unscrambler multivariate analysis software I also tried on the past but as that subject is not my Forte .I leave it our in house statisticians to do that tedious work most of the time…

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As always, I am glad to read your comments. Thank you all for your advice!

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Ohh… I almost forget, FYI I also tried the open source statistical tool R.along , Rstudio and Rcmdr having its Sensominer package( specific for sensory analysis) is but you have to familiarize with the R interface which has a steep learning curve. It’s advantage is its TOTALLY FREE if compared to Xsltat, Minitab and Unscrambler which cost heaps specially the latter…

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