As typical consumers, we probably smell/taste hundreds of different things in a given day. If you are working in the food industry (especially flavour houses), this number could easily reach a thousand! A flavourist will typically need to quantitatively & qualitatively identify individual chemicals in flavour formulations & different food applications. How does one quantify the strength of individual chemicals?
In 1914, Alexander Graham Bell noted:
"Did you ever measure a smell? Can you tell whether one smell is just twice strong as another? Can you measure the difference between one kind of smell and another? It is very obvious that we have very many different kinds of smells, all the way from the odour of violets and roses up to asafetida. But until you can measure their likeness and differences, you can have no science of odour. If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell"1
This work was presented in a poster at the 9th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium:
Comparison of the Preferred Attribute Elicitation method to conventional profiling for extracting consumers’ yogurt texture preferences A. Grygorczyk, I. Lesschaeve, M. Corredig, L. Duizer.
Attributes driving consumer preference are commonly derived from trained panel descriptive data coupled with consumer liking scores through techniques such as preference mapping. The method examined in this study, which we will refer to as Preferred Attribute Elicitation (PAE), derives this information solely from an untrained panel of consumers. The method has experienced some limited usage in industrial settings, however there exists a lack of information regarding how the results of this method compare to the descriptive analysis approach. The PAE method is carried out in a round-table setting and involves six steps: (1) product liking rating (individually), (2) attribute generation, (3) attribute grouping into categories, (4) line-scale generation, (5) importance ranking of attributes, (6) product attribute rating (individually).
As typical consumers, we probably smell/taste hundreds of different things in a given day. If you are working in the food industry (especially flavour houses), this number could easily reach a thousand! A flavourist will typically need to quantitatively & qualitatively identify individual chemicals in flavour formulations & different food applications. How does one quantify the strength of individual chemicals?
This work was presented in a poster at the 9th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium:
