Evaluation of bottled nutritive drinks using a taste sensor

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the taste of 20 bottled nutritive drinks, all commercially available on the Japanese market, both in human gustatory sensation tests and using a multi-channel taste sensor. In the gustatory sensation tests, seven trained healthy volunteers were asked to score the drinks in terms of the intensities of four basic tastes (sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness), for overall palatability (ease of drinking), and for nine components of palatability (astringency, pungency, fruitiness, tasting of a medicinal plant, refreshing, irritating to the throat, seeming beneficial, good aftertaste, and the desire to drink again). The data were analysed to determine the critical factors for overall palatability. There was a positive linear correlation between overall palatability and ‘sourness’, ‘fruitiness’, ‘refreshing’, and ‘good aftertaste’ scores ( r = 0.79, 0.85, 0.74, and 0.70, respectively). There was a negative correlation between overall palatability and ‘bitterness intensity’, ‘tasting of a medicinal plant’, ‘seeming beneficial’, and ‘pungency’ scores ( r = −0.76, −0.64, −0.62, and −0.50, respectively). When evaluated using a multi-channel taste sensor, there was a positive linear correlation between the intensities of sourness and bitterness determined by the human volunteers and those predicted by the taste sensor ( r = 0.85 and 0.71, respectively). The pungency intensity, as evidenced in gustatory sensation tests, could be also predicted by sensor output ( r = 0.84). The taste sensor seems therefore to be a potentially useful tool in evaluating the palatability of bottled nutritive drinks.