Sensory and Consumer Research in Food Product Design and Development

Howard R. Moskowitz, Jacqueline H. Beckley, Anna V. A. Resurreccion

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813813660
• eBook ISBN: 9781119945956
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

During the past thirty years, companies have recognized the consumer as the key driver for business and product success. This recognition has, in turn, generated its own drivers: sensory analysis and marketing research, leading first to a culture promoting the expert and then evolving into the systematic acquisition of consumer-relevant information to build businesses. Sensory and Consumer Research in Food Product Design and Development is the first book to present, from the business viewpoint, the critical issues faced by business leaders from both the research development and business development perspective.

This popular volume, now in an updated and expanded second edition, presents a unique perspective afforded by the author team of Moskowitz, Beckley, and Resurreccion: three leading practitioners in the field who each possess both academic and business acumen. Newcomers to the field will be introduced to systematic experimentation at the very early stages, to newly emerging methods for data acquisition/knowledge development, and to points of view employed by successful food and beverage companies. The advanced reader will find new ideas, backed up by illustrative case histories, to provide another perspective on commonly encountered problems and their practical solutions.

This book is aimed at professionals in all sectors of the food and beverage industry. Sensory and Consumer Research in Food Product Design and Development is especially important for those business and research professionals involved in the early stages of product development, where business opportunity is often the greatest.

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Emerging corporate knowledge needs: how and where does sensory fit?

INTRODUCTION

We begin this second edition of our book with history, as we did before. Why? It's simple. The history of the field tells us a lot about how people think, what problems they faced, what methods they developed, what institutions they created, and what they considered to be worthy of studying and doing. History is not, in the words of Henry Ford, “one damned thing after another.” Rather, history embeds within it keys to what we do and why we do it. History is of paramount importance in the world of sensory science because knowing how the field developed tells us a lot about why we do what we do.

During the past 30 years, companies have recognized the consumer as the key driver for product success. This recognition has, in turn, generated its own drivers—sensory analysis and marketing research, leading first to a culture promoting the expert and evolving into the systematic acquisition of consumer-relevant information. Styles of management change as well. At one time, it was fashionable to laud the “maverick executive” as a superior being, perhaps the management equivalent of the expert. Over time, we have seen this type of cowboy machismo declining into disrepute. Replacing this maverick decision-making has been an almost slavish adoption of fact-based decisions, and the flight from knowledge-based insight into the “soulless” reportage of facts.

How does corporate decision-making affect a discipline such as sensory analysis, which has only begun to come into its own during the past four decades? If one were to return to business as it was conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, one might discern a glimmer of fact-based decisions among the one or two dozen practitioners of what we now call sensory analysis. These individuals—scattered in corporations, working quietly in universities, executing food acceptance tests for the US military, and a handful of others scattered about in other countries around the world—were founding the field that now provides this type of fact-based guidance for product development and quality assurance. In the early years, many of the practitioners did not even know that they were creating a science that would emerge as critical, exciting, and eminently practical. These pioneers simply did the tests the best they could, attempted to understand how people perceived products, and in the main kept to themselves, hardly aware of how they were to affect the food industry in the years to come. Many of these pioneers were bench chemists and product developers. They just wanted to know what their work products tasted like, smelled like, especially when the work product was a new food.

As the competition among companies to secure market share in consumer goods relentlessly increased, and as the consumer continued to be bombarded with new products, it became increasingly obvious to many that consumer acceptance would be increasingly paramount. Whereas before one might hear such excusing platitudes as “people always have to eat” as an excuse for complacent mediocrity, one would now hear catch phrases such as “consumer tested” or “significantly preferred.” Companies were catching on to the fact that the consumer had to actually like the product. The privations of World War II and before were fading in memory. The supply economy was giving way to the demand economy. The consumer, surfeited with the offerings of countless food manufacturers, could pick and choose among new products that often differed only in flavor or in size from those currently available. In the face of such competition by fellow manufacturers, it became necessary for the marketer and product developer to better understand what consumers would actually buy, and in so doing perhaps understand what consumers really wanted.

The end of the twentieth century saw the professionalization of product testing. What had started out 50 years before as a small endeavor in corporations to “taste test foods” as one step in the quality process became a vast undertaking (e.g., Hinreiner, 1956; Pangborn, 1964). Company after company installed large market research departments reporting to marketing and sensory analysis departments reporting to R&D. Whether this was the optimal structure was unclear. Often, the two departments did similar studies. The express purpose of these often-competing departments was to ascertain what consumers wanted, and feed back this information in a digested, usable form to those who either had to create the product at R&D or those who had to sell the product. The era of fact-based decision-making was in full swing. Decisions would no longer be made on the basis of the response from the president's “significant other” (whether husband, wife, child), but rather would be made on the basis of well-established facts, such as the positive reaction by consumers who would test the product under conditions that management would trumpet as being “controlled and scientific.” Such fact-based decision-making would be introduced into all areas dealing with consumers, first as a curiosity, then as a luxury, and finally as a desperate necessity for survival. For the food and beverage industries, the emergence of fact-based decision-making would bring new methods in its wake.

THE ERA OF THE EXPERT, AND THE EMERGENCE OF SENSORY ANALYSIS OUT OF THAT ERA

The real business-relevant beginnings of sensory analysis occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, and can be traced to the quantum leap in business thinking provided by Arthur D. Little Inc. (ADL), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ADL was a well-known consulting company, with one division specializing in agribusiness. In the 1940s, a group of enterprising consultants at ADL developed the Flavor Profile, a then-revolutionary idea to quantify the flavor characteristics of foods (Cairncross & Sjostrom, 1950; Little, 1958). The Flavor Profile was precedent shattering on at least two fronts:

i. Systems thinking: No one was thinking about flavor in this organized, quantifiable fashion. It was certainly unusual to even think of a formalized representation of flavor. Researchers had thought about flavors for years, but the formalization of a descriptive method was certainly new.

ii. Anyone could become an expert—albeit after training: The expert reigned supreme, in brewing, in perfumery, etc., but to have the experts created out of ordinary consumers by a formalized training program was new thinking.

Sensory analysis as an empirical discipline emerged from the application of expert judgments in formalized evaluation. Before the Flavor Profile (Caul, 1957), the expert judgment would certainly be called upon and relied upon as the last word. The notion of consumer acceptance, or consumer input, was not particularly important, although the successful product would be touted as filling a consumer need. The Flavor Profile formalized the role of the expert in the situation of disciplined evaluation. The expert was given a new task—evaluate the product under scientific conditions. ADL won numerous contracts on the basis of their proclamation that the Flavor Profile could assure so-called flavor leadership for a product.

At about the same time as ADL was selling its Flavor Profile, the US Government was winning World War II. The popular aphorism attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte that “an army travels on its stomach” guided the development of new methods. The US Quartermaster Corps recognized the importance of food to soldiers’ health and morale. The slowly emerging scientific interest in measuring responses to food, appearing here and there in industry, took strong root in the military. Measuring soldiers’ food preferences became important because the commanders could often see firsthand the effects of food rejection. Unlike the executives sitting at the heads of food companies, the commanders walked among their troops. Failure to feed the troops meant a weakened army and the real prospect of a lost battle or even war. Food acceptance became a vital issue, and its measurement a key military task (Meiselman & Schutz, 2003).

The confluence of sensory analysis in the food industry and the military recognition of the importance of consumer-acceptable food produced in its wake the sensory analysis industry. The industry did not emerge overnight. It emerged slowly, haltingly, like all such new creatures do, with false starts hampered by wrong decisions, but in its own way matured. Expert panel approaches begun by ADL matured to more quantitative, statistics-friendly methods such as quality data analysis (QDA) (Stone et al., 1974). Military interest in food acceptance led to advances in sensory testing, and the 9-point hedonic scale (Peryam & Pilgrim, 1957) to actually measure the level of acceptance. The US Government funded research into food acceptance (Meiselman, 1978) and eventually got into the funding of taste and smell psychophysics, especially at the US Army Natick Laboratories where Harry Jacobs built up a cadre of young scientists interested in the sensory evaluation of foods (Meiselman & Schutz, 2003). Other organizations such as the Swedish Institute for Food Preservation Research in Gothenburg (now Swedish Institute for Food Research) pioneered research methods and applications as well as recording the literature from the burgeoning field (Drake & Johannsen, 1969).

Industrial organizations adopted methods for product testing, and the field grew and prospered. The field heralded its maturity through journals and conferences. The first major international symposium involving sensory analysis took almost 50 years from start of the field in the 1940s. This Pangborn Symposium held in Jarvenpaa, Finland, just outside of Helsinki, attracted more than 200 participants. The organizing committee headed by Dr. Hely Tuorila had expected this conference to represent a one-off event, but the palpable excitement shared by the participants soon changed the committee's mind. Eleven years later, the same conference, in its fifth convening, held in Boston, attracted more than 700 participants. Popularity increased so that from being held every third year the conference is now held every second year. Allied conferences, such as Sensometrics, also developed, to the point where the Sensometrics Conference is held on the years that the Pangborn Symposium is not. The field was well on its way. Scientific decision-making in the food industry had given rise to a new discipline.

The ensuing years would be good to the field of sensory. The Pangborn conferences would be the first specific conferences. They would give impetus to more US-based conferences such as the SSP (Society of Sensory Professionals). Of course, once these meetings began to occur, the floodgates opened. There would be meetings in Europe, Latin America, and Central America. It is always a good thing when meetings proliferate. At some point, they rationalize and the better ones survive, but the first meetings of the various sensory organizations pump the necessary emotional and intellectual nutrients into the field.

The success of the Pangborn Symposia, along with their continuing increase in attendance in the face of decreasing attendance at other conferences, deserves a short digression that can also shed light on the growing field of sensory analysis and the pent-up needs of the members. When the era of the expert was in its heyday, there were no conferences to speak of, and the professionals in sensory analysis were few, scattered, and scarcely aware of each other, all laboring away in, as John Kapsalis had often said, “splendid isolation.” The Pangborn Symposium brought these individuals together in a concentrated, 4-day format, somewhat longer than that provided by the more conventional professional organization such as IFT (Institute of Food Technologists). At least six things occur at such extended meetings:

i. Masses of people with very similar interests interact in a confined location. The participants meet with individuals who are, by and large, sympathetic to them. Rather than participating in specialized symposia where the sensory specialists come together, albeit as a minority, in the Pangborn Symposium they come together with many of the same purposes. This mass of people is an intellectual hothouse.

ii. Easy meetings occur so that like-minded people can reach out to each other. The interpersonal nature of the meeting cannot be overemphasized. Many people have known each other for years, so the close and long meeting allows these people to renew acquaintanceship.

iii. Density plus time plus fatigue reduce interpersonal barriers. The surrounding density of people at the meeting and the continued stimulation over time from seeing people with common interests leads to fatigue, real reduction of barriers, and increased professional intimacy.

iv. Long meetings create shared memories. The 4-day period suffices to imprint many positive memories of interactions on the participants. The scientist lives in the future, propped up by memories and propelled by hopes.

v. Information intake and exchange allows people to take each other's measure. The plethora of posters, talks, and meals shared together allows people to come and go at their convenience, spend time looking at other people's work in an unhurried situation and, in general, get comfortable with each other. They size up each other, challenge, share, form opinions of character, of promise, and of expectations for each other's future. In a sense, people learn about each other in a way no journal article could ever hope to imitate.

vi. The laying on of hands, from the older to the young, occurs more readily in this environment. The young researcher can get to meet the older, more accomplished researcher on a variety of occasions, some professional and some social. This opportunity to meet each other in the field produces in its wake a cadre of inspired young professionals who can receive the necessary reinforcement from their older role models in this artificially created, short-lived “hothouse of kindred souls.” One should never underestimate the value of interpersonal contacts in science, and the effect on the morale, motivation, and joy of a younger scientist who is recognized and encouraged by an older role model. The Pangborn Symposium was set up, perhaps inadvertently, but nonetheless successfully, to produce that motivation and “laying on of hands” over its extended, 4-day time.

THE MANIFOLD CONTRIBUTION OF PSYCHOPHYSICS

Psychophysics is the study of the relation between physical stimuli and subjective experience (Stevens, 1975). The oldest subdiscipline of experimental psychology, psychophysics makes a perfectly natural, almost uncannily appropriate, companion to sensory analysis. The study of how we perceive appearances, aroma, tastes, and textures of food might easily be a lifelong topic of psychophysical research. Indeed, many of today's leading sensory analysts have been grounded either in formal education in psychophysics or at least have enjoyed a long-term interest in the details of psychophysics. Psychophysics did not start out as the conjoined twin of sensory analysis, although to many novices in the field the intertwining of the two areas seems unusually tight and quite meaningful.

Psychophysicists are natural complements to sensory analysts, but with a slight change in focus. Sensory analysts study the product, using the person as a bioassay device. Knowledge of how we perceive stimuli does not help s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Titles in the IFT Press series
• Preface
• Author biographies
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Emerging corporate knowledge needs: how and where does sensory fit?
• 2: Making use of existing knowledge and increasing its business value—the forgotten productivity tool
• 3: Understanding consumers’ and customers’ needs—the growth engine
• 4: Innovation's friend: integrated market and sensory input for food product design and development
• 5: A process to bring consumer mind-sets into a corporation
• 6: Developing relevant concepts
• 7: High-level product assessments
• 8: So what can sensory do for me (or for my company)?
• 9: What types of tests do sensory researchers do to measure sensory response to the product? and . . . why do they do them?
• 10: What can sensory researchers do to characterize products? and . . . how does one select the best method?
• 11: So what are the practical considerations in actually running a test? what do I need to know? what does the rest of the company need to know?
• 12: Evolving sensory research
• 13: Addressable MindsTM and directed innovation: new vistas for the sensory community
• Index