Unlock Product Insights with a Full Sensory Profile
In today’s competitive marketplace, success hinges on more than just product formulation. You must create a product experience that consistently delights consumers.
At Eurofins Nutrition Analysis Center, we help food manufacturers understand how their product is perceived in the real world through a smart analytical protocol—including the most critical instrument for testing human satisfaction: the human senses.
What We Do: Sensory Testing—Refined and Integrated
Our trained human panels provide in-depth sensory evaluations across key attributes like taste, texture, aroma, and appearance. A general descriptive review around these parameters often serves as an important starting point for shelf-life studies, product launches, or comparison studies. These descriptive measures are readily customizable for testing samples against control benchmarks or competitor products.
But we don’t stop there.
We pair our human panel data with instrumental analysis using tools like texture analysis and colorimetry, helping you evaluate your product quantitatively. This hybrid approach blends subjective perception with objective precision—and when combined with chemistry and microbiological testing, gives you a truly 360° understanding of your product.
The result? Faster decisions. Fewer reformulations. Important insights. Better outcomes.
Sensory Testing That Goes Beyond the Surface
When it comes to sensory analysis, a one-size-fits-all approach simply cannot cover all the product parameters of importance. A tailored sensory approach is critical to ensuring you are not grading hot sauce using the same set of criteria as your protein powder stability study.
Customized attribute testing can help solve this problem and create a plan that accounts for what’s most important in your product.
Basic panels often evaluate critical sensory properties, including:
- Taste – Sweetness, acidity, bitterness, off-notes, staleness
- Texture – Crunchiness, chewiness
- Aroma – Strength, freshness, off-odors
- Color – Visual appearance and/or quantitative measurement
An experienced team can help you develop a plan that covers multiple parameters specifically for areas of product concern. A few tailored examples:
- Cold Brew Coffee: Total plate count paired with perceived acidity
- Protein Powder: Perceived flavor degradation alongside water activity
- Tortilla Chips: Peroxide value plus perceived rancidity and staleness
- Fresh Salsa: Sensory-rated freshness supported by microbial indicators
Our team welcomes your specifications, questions, and context. The more we know about your product, the more actionable and precise our evaluation becomes. Whether you’re launching, reformulating, or validating shelf life, we’ll help you build consumer confidence one data point (and taste test) at a time.
Advanced Sensory to Quantify Differences
Need to compare against a known standard or competitor? That’s where we use a defined 0–9 scale to assess the degree of difference between samples and controls:
0 = No difference
9 = Complete deviation from target integrity
Optional methodologies such as Paired Comparison, Triangle Test, and Circle All That Apply can be added to enhance data clarity. We typically recommend panels of five to six trained individuals for these studies.
Descriptive Testing (Qualitative Evaluation)
For simpler or exploratory projects, our descriptive testing captures qualitative observations using standardized, client-supplied terminology. This approach is ideal for characterizing early prototypes, flavor profiles, or visual cues. These panels are often smaller (two to three people) but provide a fast, cost-effective snapshot of your product’s performance.
Example description: “Golden brown liquid. Clear, peach-forward aroma. Balanced sweetness. Slight tartness. No detectable off-notes.”
Supporting Stability Studies Following Reformulation
Changing dyes, colorants, or ingredient formulation with an eye toward evolving regulations, clean-label initiatives, or shifting consumer preferences can often introduce new challenges for product stability and consistency.
At Eurofins Nutrition Analysis Center, we routinely perform product stability studies across a variety of temperatures and conditions—monitoring product performance over time with a combination of colorimetry and analytical testing, microbiological monitoring, and trained descriptive panels to assess visual appearance over time.
Our team has the experience and analytical testing background to help you build a customized protocol to validate new formulations before sending them out into the market.
Why It Matters: Sensory Testing as a Strategic Tool
Traditional sensory testing is often siloed or sidelined in favor of more analytical approaches. Integrating a sensory approach into a broader quality and development pipeline is incredibly valuable to ensure your product wins with consumers.
At the Eurofins Nutrition Analysis Center, we don’t just offer opinions; we deliver structured, scientifically valid results that can directly inform product development, shelf-life studies, quality control, and post-production surveillance.
In particular, sensory testing paired with instrumental analysis supports:
- Obtain objective, third-party product feedback
- Reduce reliance on consumer guesswork
- Guide reformulation with clarity
- Establish defensible benchmarks for QA
- Improve cross-functional decision-making
We meet your needs whether you're a startup refining a concept or a global brand executing a complex market launch.
Ready to bring clarity to your product perception?
Contact us today to build your testing plan and start planning your custom sensory testing project.
