Training of Sensory Panel using Odor Reference Solutions

Studies on Characterization of Odor-descriptive Terms for Food Products, Part VII

Abstract

In case of odor evaluation of foods by sensory test, the variation among panelists in responses to an odor attribute becomes an issue. This experiment was carried out to examine the training effect of sensory panel using the odor reference solutions. Ten girl students of college were trained as follows. After the explanation of odor attributes of an odor reference solution, the panels sniffed the reference solution and expressed its odor attributes using 43 terms by a 5-point scaling method. This training procedure was periodically repeated five times for 15 odor reference solutions. On the scatter diagram of sample scores by quantification theory III, the sensory scores located far from the scores of image pattern before training, but became more closer after the repetition of training. The odor attributes of the reference solutions remained in panel's memory even after 2months. At the sight of theses catter diagrams as a whole, 15 odor reference solutions were located circularly around the intersection point of two axes, and each sample score after the training shifted toward the position farther from the intersection point. This showed that the odor attributes of 15 odor reference solutions were characterized distinctly by training.