Why sensory acuity screening matters in food and beverage manufacturing
13 June 2025 | Molly Johnstone, Sensory Scientist - Training
All food and drink manufacturers take immense pride in the products they create. While safety is paramount, the quality and sensory quality of a product are equally vital to its success. Sensory quality—how a product looks, smells, tastes, and feels—can make or break the consumer experience.
To safeguard this sensory integrity, taste panels should be integrated at key stages of production where sensory failures are most likely to occur. But this raises an important question: Who participates in these panels, and are they truly qualified to be tasters?
The effectiveness of a sensory panel depends not just on having assessors, but on having the right assessors—individuals screened and trained to detect subtle differences in flavour, texture, odour, and appearance. Without proper screening, training and calibration, even well-intentioned feedback can lead to inconsistent or misleading results.
Ensuring your assessors possess the necessary sensory acuity is essential for maintaining quality standards within your food and beverage manufacturing process. Consider the implications: a colleague responsible for verifying colour accuracy may be colour blind; a sensory assessor in a pork processing facility may be unable to detect boar taint; or someone evaluating caffeinated beverages might be insensitive to bitterness. These scenarios highlight just a few critical reasons why screening for sensory capabilities is so important.
By screening your assessors, you not only provide your business with confidence that the individuals responsible for product release are truly competent, but you also empower your assessors with insights into their own sensory strengths and limitations. For example, discovering an insensitivity to salt does not disqualify someone from contributing to visual, odour, or texture evaluations. Rather, it allows you to assign roles more strategically, ensuring product quality is upheld through informed and reliable assessments.
Basic taste screening
Using a sensory basic taste screening kit supplied by Campden BRI provides an easy and efficient way to screen up to 30 assessors at once. These kits screen assessors’ ability to detect all 5 basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami in line with BS 5929 Part 7:1992 / ISO 3972 :199. This is an essential part to monitoring quality within your manufacturing process. For instance, if someone is evaluating a cake product and there’s an issue with the sugar content, how can you be sure they can even detect sweetness if their sensory abilities haven’t been assessed? By properly screening your assessors, you can significantly increase confidence in your product evaluations and ensure more effective release of products.
Odour identification screening
This kit includes three vials designed to help assessors detect, recall, and describe odours. These can be customised to suit your specific requirements. By removing visual cues and using three-digit coded vials, the focus shifts entirely to the odour, enhancing the assessor’s ability to identify and articulate scents. The reusable vials support repeated exposure, reinforcing memory and improving odour recognition over time.
Ranking basic taste kits
Ranking kits are a useful tool to screen your assessors for their ability to discriminate different concentrations of a basic taste between 3 or more samples. Not only are they a good screening tool, but they can also be used to train your assessors about attribute intensities. These kits can be used for all 5 basic tastes, or solely for one. They contain 4 different intensities of the basic taste, and the assessors is asked to rank these from weakest to strongest.
Taste sensitivity threshold kits
This kit is used to assess panellists’ ability to detect and recognise a certain taste: sweet, sour, salt, bitter or umami, at 8 different concentrations based on ISO 3972:199. But why would you want to use one of these? – application could include a reformulation of your product to reduce the amount of sugar inline with HFSS. You want to ensure that your assessors can detect a certain concentration of sugar so that they can accurately assess the reformulated product. Threshold testing is an invaluable tool to understand the feedback your assessors provide during taste panels.
Find out more about our sensory screening and training kits. If you have any questions, please contact sensory.training@campdenbri.co.uk for further information.
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