20 - Practical uses of sensory evaluation for the assessment of soft drink shelf life

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the practical use of sensory techniques for soft drink shelf life setting and confirmation. It introduces the use of a resource efficient risk-based method for shelf life determination and gives an overview of the different approaches to setting shelf life for soft drinks. A list of questions and answers are posed for the sensory scientist to consider prior to setting up their shelf life experiments, and soft drink-based case studies give details of two different experiments to help with the design of future shelf life experiments.