Taster Validation Scheme

Why validate your tasters?

Until you’ve assessed the competence of your professional tasters you can’t be sure they’ll perform at the level you need them to.

How can you go about assessing your tasters’ abilities to identify flavours, scale their intensity, and perform in routine tasting?

Experience and skill sometimes go hand in hand, but that should never be taken for granted. Even the most experienced of tasters can perform badly. Lack of concentration, illness, medication – they can all conspire against the best efforts and skills of tasters.

If you are going to rely on the results produced by your sensory analysis programme, you have to be able to rely on the performance of your tasters.

Taster competence cannot be taken for granted. You have to measure it in an objective way.

Poor taster performance can result in:

Poor discrimination between samples.
Confusion of one flavour term with another.
Differences in how assessors use intensity scales to rate different samples or attributes.
Differences in how assessors perceive the nature of one or more attributes.
Inconsistencies in assessments.

Assessors

Years

Data Points

Countries

Types of tests

FLAVOUR IDENTIFICATION

Assessors have to identify flavours present in the sample. They will be presented with six samples under blind conditions, with one sample as a reference.

RANK-RATING

Rank-rating is used to discover the intensity of the flavours in the sample. Assessors have to rank the samples in order of intensity and assign each a value, using a 0-10 scale.