María del Mar Lorente Lamas & Mª José Sánchez Climent

ainia centro tecnológico

Paterna, Valencia (España)

 mlorente@ainia.es

 www.ainia.es

Reference material plays and important role in training a sensory evaluation panel as it illustrates sensory characteristics and their intensity. It helps in developing appropriate descriptive terminology and reduces the amount of training time.

Moreover, properly chosen or developed test material is a fundamental condition of proficiency testing where the performance of individual laboratories for specific tests is to be determined by means of inter-laboratory tests.

As all reference material used in any analytical field, the material should be stable, homogeneous, and similar to the products usually analyzed. Besides, food products must be chemically and microbiologically safe.

This presentation will outline the characteristics and requirements that reference material should met. Difficulties in accomplishing these requirements will be showed. A case study about development of reference material for panel calibration for sensory testing of food in contact with paper and board will be presented. This study has been integrated in the EU project “Calibration of sensory testing of food contact materials-paper and board”. Definition of the reference materials required, procedures for reference material development and studies for verification of stability, homogeneity and reproducibility of the samples will be presented. Besides, validation of reference samples by comparison of panel performance before and after training different panels with these samples will be outlined.

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