A LESSON ON SENSORY EVALUATION OF POTATO CHIPS BY SUA STUDENTS

Sensory evaluation is a scientific discipline that analyses and measures human responses to the composition of food and drink, example appearance, touch, odour, texture, temperature and taste. It can be used to compare similarities or differences in a range of dishes or products, evaluate a range of existing dishes or food products, analyse food samples for improvements, gauge responses to a dish or product (acceptable, unacceptable, explore specific characteristics of an ingredient or dish/food product, check whether a final dish or food product meets its original specification, provide objective and subjective feedback data to enable informed decisions to be made. The most common sensory evaluation conducted is a subjective test (consumer preference test). This is widely used by food industries when launching a new food product in the market. The consumer preference test should be conducted to assure the overall acceptability of the food product to the consumers.

The most common consumer preference test is the Hedonic test which uses the hedonic scale to determine the level of acceptability in terms of different organoleptic characteristics. To conduct this test, it uses the 9point scale hedonic scale and it involves the following steps.

1.  Preparation of the food samples to be tested.
2.  A panelist will be asked to taste each sample in turn and tick a box, from '1 Dislike Very Much' to '9. Like Very Much' to indicate their preference. This is a 9-point-scale.   Sometime a 5-point-scale is used.
3.  The panelist may also wish to make remarks about the products’ appearance, taste, odor and texture.
4. Data Analysis; which will show which sample received the highest/lowest scores, which sample was preferred.

Video description of hedonic test. 

Questionnaire for Hedonic test

Name_________________

Date__________________

Pan.  No__________________

Please taste the potato chips in the following order. Indicate the how much you like the sample by assigning number 1-9 beside the three digit coded sample most appropriate number in the table;

sample	420	631	364
Appearance/colour
Aroma
Texture
Crispness
Salt
Taste
Overall acceptability

  

Hedonic scale

9-Like extremely

8-Like very much

7-Like moderately

6-Like slightly

5-Neither like nor dislike

4-Dislike slightly

3-Dislike moderately

2-Dislike very much

1-Dislike extremely

Panelists reading the instructions on hedonic test questionnaire

Panelists during sensory evaluation

Panelists filling the hedonic questionnaire.