The long room is divided into private booths, each dimly bathed in red light. Winifred Conkling steps into chamber No. 7. Sitting down in a swivel chair, she stares at a small door in the wall and waits. Others are in booths to the left and right of her, but she can`t see what they are doing. In the hush, all she can hear is the sound of chewing.
Suddenly the little door pops open and a hand thrusts a steaming plate onto the counter before her-Sample 238. The red light distorts the color of the food, but her nose knows it`s a pancake. She cuts a piece from the center, puts it in her mouth and chews thoughtfully.
The taste and smell of wheat hit her senses; she finds ”wheat” listed on the ballot served with the food, and she pencils in a 4 (out of a possible high of 15). The wheat has a slightly raw taste; she gives it a 1 for
”rawness.” Sweetness is noticeable, but the taste of leavening is not;
she writes in 3 for ”sweetness,” 0 for ”leavening.” There`s a hint of dairy and egg tastes, so she scores 1 for each. As she continues chewing, the pancake balls up and has a slimy, greasy mouthfeel; she scores a 6 for
”cohesiveness,” a 4 for ”greasiness.” Then she unceremoniously spits out the wad of pancake and presses a button to signal that she`s ready for the next sample.
Twice a day for half an hour, Conkling and 20 other adventurous recruits take time out from their jobs as engineers, technicians, writers, secretaries and statisticians here at Consumers Union to explore the world of food, both flavor and texture. They sip beverages, savor spaghetti sauce, nibble turkey and chomp chocolate bars, carefully analyzing and recording their every sensation.
The data that emerge are the basis for the product ratings of packaged, canned and frozen foods in Consumer Reports, a monthly magazine whose judgments are closely watched by both subscribers and food manufacturers. In its testing labs here in suburban New York, the 51-year-old Consumers Union, which publishes the reports, rates 12 food products a year-everything from soup to peanut butter. (In-house taste testing, like other volunteer activities at CU, has been temporarily suspended while union contract negotiations are going on.
Taste-testing may sound like fun, but when the stakes-a company`s reputation-are high, the work is intense and thorough. Testers may be called upon to taste, for months on end, such things as breakfast cereal, syrup without pancakes and pancakes without syrup.
”Sensory evaluation is a scientific discipline, so we have terminology; you can`t say, `Mmmmm, this is good,` or `Yuck,` ” says Louise Miller Mann, head of the Sensory Evaluation lab here.
”Learning to taste is like learning to appreciate music. At first (the listener) can`t distinguish one symphony from another, but gradually he can pick out the sound of the oboe, the clarinet. In the same way (the taster)
learns he can pick out the oats or wheat-raw or toasted-from the total product.”
For the testers, getting past the rigorous screening is a formidable hurdle.
When Mann called for volunteers recently to serve on taste panels, 200 eager CU staff members responded. She gave each one a probing interview.
”I wanted to see if they were interested in what I was doing,” she says, remarking that motivation is pretty important to get through six weeks of testing a food product. ”Did they take it seriously, or did they think my questions were silly?”
Each would-be taster had to identify the four basic tastes-sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Some people get those confused, says Mann, who has a master`s degree in food science. There were also tests for differing intensities of sweetness and firmness, and a test for common odors to see how well the volunteers identified smells.
After the month-long screening process, only 45 people were left, and half of those opted out because they couldn`t spare the extra time the twice- daily tastings require. Food snobs were not among the chosen.
The 21 who did qualify spent the next three months in intensive training. For an hour each day, they sampled foods of all types, from lemon frosting to catsup to corn bread.
To calibrate their taste buds, they were introduced to the taste and texture scales CU uses as references. With the help of sweet, sour, salty and bitter solutions mixed in various intensities according to fixed recipes, they learned to break any food taste into its component parts and position it accurately on these scales. Tasters must be able to identify a No. 9 sweet, for instance, whether it appears in a muffin, orange juice or strawberry jam. The crew emerged from sensory boot camp able to make such fine distinctions in taste as between chocolate and cocoa, vanilla and vanillin, and, in texture, between adhesiveness and cohesiveness.
”We learned how to spit, too,” Conkling, a financial writer, says wryly. ”It`s actually one of the most important things. I was frankly surprised how often in the testing you find food that isn`t fresh.”
The training has some side effects.
”It makes you fussier about bad foods,” observes magazine editor Mike Echols, who finds he can no longer eat some of his old favorites. ”I couldn`t feed myself hamburger steak TV dinners anymore. That stuff is universally ghastly. The meat isn`t good, and it`s not well prepared.”
”I probably make more comments at the dinner table than I used to, like, `H`mmm, this seems a little high on oregano,”` said Ned Groth, CU`s associate technical director.
Before testing a particular type of food, a panel (usually seven tasters) spends five or six hours sampling a group of products in that category. They never see any labels; it`s all done blind. As a team, they come up with a brainstorming list of words to describe each sensation they experience.
For peanut butter, the panel first tasted fresh peanuts and listed several kinds of peanut flavor-raw, roasted, overroasted and peanut skins. Along with these, they found the peanut butters contained other flavors, like sweetness, saltiness, sweet aromatics (such as molasses or honey), rancidity and bitterness. Textures, like adhesiveness, that stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth quality, were also noted.
The panelists often get into a lively dispute over their perceptions, but it is usually a problem of vocabulary, says Mann. Once they`ve clarified the definitions, the terms they`ve chosen become the ballot they will use during the actual taste test.
When they are at last ready to rate the products, they enter the soundproof chamber. ”We use red lights because they eliminate color,” says Mann. ”We don`t want panelists tasting with their eyes.”
Visual cues can mislead. In a test CU conducted in the 1940s on dessert gelatins, blindfolded panelists were unable to distinguish between ”cherry,” ”raspberry” and ”strawberry” flavors. Without the help of color, they all tasted alike.
In individual booths, the tasters are served only four samples per sitting, twice a day. To control all the variables, they taste each sample according to a strict procedure agreed on ahead of time. To gauge spaghetti texture, for example, they bit with molars into two noodles folded twice.
Though CU`s cold breakfast cereal ratings were based on nutrition rather than taste, the sensory testing was nonetheless painstaking-a little too painstaking for some appetites. After a month and a half of eating the 58 cereals dry, the panelists decided they should also try them with milk. They repeated the tests, adding a fixed amount of milk to a fixed amount of cereal, then waiting exactly 30 seconds before tasting. Three months and 464 bowls of cereal later, the panel had all the enthusiasm of a soggy cornflake. Even now, the mere mention of cereal brings groans.
The sensory panelists must check their personal likes and dislikes at the door.
”Think of tasters as measuring instruments,” says Groth. Usually products are tasted four times each by seven people. That`s a total of 28 tastings for each brand. A statistician then averages all those scores and comes up with a sensory profile of that brand.
Independently of the panelists, Mann or an expert taster in the food industry decides what an ideal example of the food should taste like. Here, for instance, is Consumer Reports` tantalizing profile of the perfect chocolate chip cookie:
”(It) provides an intense jolt of chocolate aroma and flavor, with just a hint of vanilla and the tastes and smells of milk and butter. The chips have the moderate `cocoa bitterness` typical of true chocolate, combined with come-hither tenderness. They melt with silky smoothness. The cookie smacks moderately of sweetness and caramel, with traces of salt, vanilla, and dairy flavors. It provides a double texture-a crisp edge, with a moderately firm, chewy center-and leaves a faint residual mouthcoating after each bite.”
The ideal sensory profile is not shared with the taste panelists. That might bias their observations. –
