Establishment of sensory evaluation panel for a biscuits manufacturing industry

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.