TESTING
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Data modeling to optimise use of sensory panels
Mark Cresswell, Mohamed Boosiri, Keir Joynson - Lucideon
Sensory panels play a pivotal role in evaluating sensory attributes of consumer products such as taste, aroma, texture, and appearance. Sensory panels of trained individuals are integral to the product development process, as their assessments are crucial for determining consumer acceptance and preference. Sensory panels operate under standardised conditions to ensure consistency and reliability in their evaluations. For oral healthcare products like toothpaste
and mouthwash, the sensory perception of performance is particularly vital. Consumer acceptance, preference, and continued use of these products rely on the complex sensory performance consumers experience in the mouth during use. This intricate process involves taste buds
on the tongue and olfactory receptors in the nose, creating a multisensory experience further influenced by texture, feel, consistency, and the emotional response to the individual experience. Sensory panels, therefore, are essential in ensuring these products meet consumer expectations and preferences.
Problem and solution Sensory panels can be time-consuming to organise, expensive to run, and subject to variability in results due to individual preferences and external factors such as panellist mood and environment. The need for extensive sensory panel testing is therefore a current pain point for industry, and as such there is a demand for a scalable technical solution that would reduce the quantity of sensory panel tests necessary for successfully executing new product launches. A recent study conducted in collaboration
between Lucideon and a prominent external partner was conceived, planned, and delivered with the aim of bridging the gap between objective analytical product performance data and the data derived from sensory panel evaluation. The goal was to discover replicable
correlations between the laboratory measured physical characteristics of foam quality of a range of toothpastes and the data obtained when these same toothpastes were evaluated by a trained sensory panel. The sensory panel evaluation of prototype
toothpaste formulations will always be one of the most important elements in targeting a new toothpaste product to satisfy an intended
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consumer demographic. It was hoped, however, that by developing
a data-led model to correlate objective toothpaste foam analytical data with sensory panel data, a larger number of toothpaste prototype formulations could be screened out from the development pathway on the basis of their physical foam characteristics to reduce the burden on the sensory panel. Ultimately, this could reduce the time and
resource constraint on the sensory panels involved in product development and reduce the time taken to launch new products. In the simplest terms, the original scope of
this study was to correlate the physical and analytical laboratory measured properties of prototype toothpaste formulations with the corresponding sensory panel data.
Traditional approach This study was split into multiple stages, beginning with the identification of suitable toothpaste foam characteristics and methodologies for measurement, which could then be linked to the sensory panel output data. Foams exhibit a wide variety of
characteristics that are crucial for their overall behaviour and consumer perception. These can be differentiated into features that define the bulk foam characteristics, and those that are more important for determining the microstructural behaviour. These features often have a time
dependency that impacts their perceived quality or performance. Features such as foam height, foam volume, volume of liquid present within the foam, drainage rate, and foam decay rate can all be used to describe bulk foam properties that contribute to the macroscopically perceivable behaviour of the foam. Conversely, properties such as bubble size,
bubble count, bubble shape, wall thickness, and wall elasticity are intrinsic to the surfactant system present within the base product, defining foam behaviour at the microscopic level.
The study of foam characteristics is
important to a wide variety of markets – food and drink, consumer healthcare products, the oil and gas industry (where anti-foaming behaviour is important), and others. As such, methods for their analysis are relatively mature in comparison to other physical phenomena. Several proprietary analytical instruments are suitable for the dynamic measurement of foam properties, simultaneously determining and exporting measurement data for multiple foam characteristics. No prior examples of projects linking sensory
panel data with foam analysis data were discovered during preparation for this work. To broaden the analysis, a foam analyser was used to measure as many parameters as possible simultaneously. Initially, the data set contained all possible analysable parameters, but through iterative
November 2024 PERSONAL CARE
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