A Digitally-Defined Analog Scheme to Aid Assessment of Food Colours

Abstract

Determination of food colour by sensory means could be subjective without instrumental assistance. This paper discusses a field comparator that can be constructed cheaply with local skills and materials for assisting sensory analysts in assessing food colours. For each food sample, a colour scheme can be defined in terms of the RGB digital combinations that are universally replicable but arranged into an analog scale. Its advantage is that sensory analysis is aided such that assessors essentially speak similar languages with respect to colour assessment. The scheme is suitable for use in field work or laboratories in developing countries where budgets are tight as the cost of the comparator is low, requiring only simple joinery and computing skills to construct. The range of colours for a particular assessment can be defined by any average computer user using the colour fill tool of a word processing package. Trials using the comparator with different colour disks are also reported. They show that untrained assessors reach close conclusions and standard deviations are reduced compared to similar but unaided assessors. While the scale selected for this report is 1 to 10 other scales may be selected and defined by individual workers in universally-defined tests like the hedonic scales.