Sensory profile analysis of chocolate drinks using quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA)

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the sensory profile of a low-fat chocolate drink. The chocolate drink is being developed in laboratory of food science and technology department at Universitas Sebelas Maret. The QDA was applied to characterize the sensory profile of the developed product (sample D) and four commercial products (sample A, B, C, and E). 13 panellists were trained to evaluate those samples based on appearance, odour, flavour, basic taste and texture. Further, ANOVA was utilized to differentiate the samples, while PCA and Spider web were applied to analyse the sensory profile of the samples. The results showed that sample D was quite similar to sample A (dominated by cocoa aroma, cocoa flavour, sandiness, undissolved particles, colour, white-cream layer, thickness texture and bitter taste), whereas sample C had similar characteristic to sample E (represented by milky aroma, milky flavour, vanilla flavour and creamy texture). Meanwhile, sample B differed from others for representing malt odour and malt flavour attributes. It is implied from the result that sample A would be the potential competitor for the developed product since they may be in the same market segmentation. Therefore, the strategy of improving the developed product should take a look at the sensory attributes of sample A as a benchmarking.