Why monitor flavour using a taster panel?

Tasting panels for food formulation research 🔬

When creating a new product recipe and trying to optimise fermentation processes, it is hard to know how different fermenter parameters and ingredients affect the final product flavour. While the internal team can provide their own views, it’s hard to infer what exactly needs to change based on abstract feedback.

The usual method in this situation is to engage a professional tasting panel. The panel produces statistically unbiased and controlled output, indicating on a quantitative scale how different recipes change on set flavour parameters.

A panel can calibrate their outputs against an existing product, e.g. in vegan meat they can benchmark the product against real meat on the market, indicating flavour characteristics to improve.

Engaging a panel early can save significant time costs, which are incurred trying to improve and scale the fermentation and production process without having quality metrics.

Tasting panels for routine quality control 🏄

Once the product recipe is set, it is crucial to screen ingredients and the final product for consistency. A customer of a typical mass market food product expects the flavour of foods they buy to stay the same day on day, month on month and year on year. This is one of the reasons why large brands spend significant resource in each year updating their coffee and whiskey blends to keep in line with changing ingredient qualities.

It is standard to use tasting panels to screen incoming ingredients and finished product to catch out defects and also confirm that what is getting shipped is on spec with a flavour “standard”.

The data we have seen shows up to 20% second purchase sales decline for products where quality was not stabilized and changed from one batch to another. The lasting impact is likely much larger with customers shifting to alternative products for good.