Abstract:
The food sector is highly reliant on
quality and price of the product. Sensory
evaluation is a scientific approach to assess food
sensorial quality criteria while eating. The
purpose of this study was to establish a new
sensory panel and train the members to evaluate
their performances on product-oriented sensory
panel in the Ceylon Biscuits Limited, a
conglomerate and well grown and popular food
industry in Sri Lanka. Therefore, the necessity has
arisen to possess a properly structured framework
of sensory analysis for obtaining reliable,
accurate and repeatable results which may be
important in the critical business decisions that
are heavily depended on assessment of the quality
of product. Initially interested 52 staff members,
with good health, were selected from the
questionnaire distributed among them from the
same organization. Then they were defined by a
set of screening tests, including basic taste
identification test, odor identification test, ranking
test for basic taste. Results of the sensory
evaluation data were statistically analyzed using
Friedman test and chi-square tests with SPSS
software. In each test, the samples showed to be
significantly different from one another (p<0.05).
The performance of the panelists was not found to
be significantly different for basic taste and odor
(p>0.05). Hence, they can be considered as a
homogenous trained sensory panel. Finally, 13
members who were able to identify all the tastes
and more than 80% of the odors of the samples
were selected as sensory panel members for the company.
