F. Sinesio, M. Peparaio, E. Moneta, F.J. Comendador

Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca per gli Alimenti e la Nutrizione (INRAN) Roma, Italy


The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the sensitivity to sensory discriminate home made asparagus creams, manipulated to create noticeable differences of taste and glutamate content, between one group of sensory professionals, previously extensively trained in the evaluation of the umami taste in food products and one group of “naïve” subjects with none training or expertise. Differences among the samples consisted in small modifications of the original recipe by weighing out glutamate rich ingredients. The two groups participated in a free-sorting and verbalisation task. They were asked to sort the products according to their similarity in sensory properties and then were invited to describe the groups using own free language. In a new testing session, the professional panellists profiled the same products by quantitative descriptive analysis, with the purpose to compare the efficiency of sorting and to exclude that a different product grouping and description of trained and untrained panellists could be affected by the applied method.

Two kinds of data were collected, nominal and continuous. On nominal data, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) on similarity matrix over the panel was applied, to create perceptual space of products and identify product groups by naive consumers and professional panellists. On continuous data by panellists a cluster analysis on significant dimensions of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was also performed to identify the groups and discriminating attributes.

Dissimilarities between the trained and untrained panellists and inter-individual variability were determined. Both the groups discriminated the samples for increasing richness of taste in the free sorting experiment but with the descriptive analysis most precise description was obtained. The professional panellists identified a higher number of classes of consumers. Besides, they utilised more specific terms learned during training than untrained panellists.

Keywords: umami taste, sensory panel, consumers, asparagus cream