A tool to help the panel leader to best monitor a sensory panel performance

Abstract

AbstractThe performance of a sensory panel is key to deliver a sensory profile with good quality. The International Organization for Standardization Sensory analysis—Methodology—Guidelines for monitoring the performance of a quantitative sensory panel define some guidelines to monitor performances with definitions and means to analyze some quality criteria. As a worldwide cosmetic company, our group has many trained panels for cosmetic categories around the world, needing to make these guidelines more precise to help panel leaders with a complementary tool to monitor trained panels and to follow the same quality standard. This tool is composed of definitions of quality criteria adapted to cosmetic specificities, statistical analysis, index, and thresholds to be used for these criteria adapted to a new and existing panel. It is composed also of precise guidelines to panel performance and an action plan to improve or maintain the quality level. These guidelines allowed to validate the performance of 15 among 16 panels in 2017 and to support panel leader to build its' training plan. After 4 years of use, these guidelines will be updated: thresholds will be reviewed and adapted to use of scale and reproducibility will be studied.Practical applicationThis tool is to be used by the sensory panel leader (on all product categories) to support them analyzing, in a simple and clear way, the robustness of each sensory panel, using the four defined KPIs (discriminating attributes and assessors, homogeneous or repeatable attributes). This tool makes possible to have a quick, standardized, and complete performance feedback and quickly compare the different panel categories globally.