Academic Consortium Publications for February 2022

We found 10 papers published in February 2022 by members of Compusense's academic consortium!

There are people who advocate for using trained panels to do sensory descriptive analysis. There are people who advocate for using consumers to profile products using methods that do not require training. We are not dogmatic on this point, because we know that one approach does not give results that are universally faster, cheaper, or better than the other. Which method is better depends on the question that needs to be answered and on the context. Not only that, but in some contexts the best answer will be “neither” and in other contexts the best answer will be “both”. Now suppose the goal is to uncover the hedonic drivers. Are consumers’ hedonic responses better explained by sensory descriptive analysis or by consumers’ own free comments? That question is investigated in a newly published paper by Park et al. (2022) called “Consumers better explained drivers of liking for products containing complex flavor with subtle differences than trained panelists”. Consumers gave the hedonic responses and stated what they liked and disliked in free comments. The authors find that consumers’ statements about what they liked and disliked explained their own hedonic responses better than a separate sensory descriptive analysis panel do. But don’t toss sensory descriptive analysis into the dustbin of history. They also write: “Although the drivers of liking were better identified from the [free comment] results, the sensory drivers need to be more clearly understood as actionable information because most drivers of liking were concept associated rather than specific sensory information.” It turns out that consumer hedonic drivers were conceptual, such as “harmonious”, so it was not obvious what consumers meant. The authors speculated that sensory descriptive analysis might help to sort that out, eventually. Read this and other fine February papers from members of the Compusense Academic Consortium.