Eric Teillet 1,2; Julia Rojas-Diaz 3; Christine Urbano 2; Philippe Courcoux 4;  Pascal Schlich 2

1 Lyonnaise des Eaux, Dijon, France
2 INRA, Centre Européen des Sciences du Goût, CNRS–UB–INRA, Dijon, France
3 Master “Gestion des Propriétés Sensorielles des Aliments”, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France
4 Ecole Nationale des Ingénieurs des Techniques des Industries Agricoles et Alimentaires (ENITIAA), Nantes, France

In a project on the taste of drinking waters, several sensory methodologies have been applied and agreed on the existence of three different types of water taste linked to the overall level of mineralization. A specific mineral water was chosen as a good representative (“pole”) of each of these type of tastes. Since these poles do not change over time, the idea of using them as references for product comparison was natural. The new technique named Polarized Sensory Positioning (PSP) consists in asking the panellists to give dissimilarity scores on a continuous scale between each product of the study and each of these poles. If scoring dissimilarity appears to be too difficult, then a simplification, consisting in assessing to which pole a product is the most similar and to which it is the least, is proposed and named “Triad-PSP”. In both variants, the data result in individual product*pole matrices that we recommend to analyse respectively by STATIS and Correspondence Analysis.

The paper will first validate the results obtained by PSP by comparing them to those obtained with more traditional techniques, such as sensory profiling with trained panellists and sorting tasks with consumers. The paper will then compare both variants in terms of level of product discrimination and number of subjects required to stabilize the results by bootstrapping the data.

The results show that both PSP variants were efficient in recovering known product structures. However, the triad option performed slightly better in terms of discrimination and was also declared easier to do by panellists. More, the strength of PSP methods is to enable aggregating data from several studies obtained on different products and different panels. However, it can be used only in situations where the definition of stable references (poles) is possible, which is quite frequent in well established markets directed by strong brands such as soda, perfumes...

Keywords:

Polarized Sensory Positioning (PSP), comparison, standards, drinking water