Pizza is one of the most beloved meals around the world. In fact, pizzerias comprise almost eight percent of all United States restaurants. Manufacturers’ sales of pizza has reached almost $40 billion each year. Americans eat about 100 acres of pizza each day, or about a staggering 350 slices per second! For a certainty, there…
Understanding the Basic Flavors of Wine
Before you can start sensory testing which flavor of wine is the most popular, you have to know a little bit about the basic flavors of wine. Wine gurus typically know these things like the back of their hand. A typical test of wine flavor usually involves certain basic characteristics of flavor. The five basic…
Sights, Scents and Tastes Come Together at Easter
Easter is a national holiday and a special time for Christian families around the world. It’s a colourful, flavourful holiday full of egg hunts, chocolate bunnies and delicious feasts. While traditions of Easter are celebrated in many different ways around the world, the historic reasons we recognize the holiday remains the same across the board.…
Making Use of Existing Knowledge
“Knowledge is power.” – Francis Bacon. This is what sensory analysis is all about. Regardless of the product, understanding what people really think about your products is invaluable. For example let’s discuss potato chips. You’ll find potato chips in virtually every place where food is sold. Let’s say you’re trying to determine which potato chips…
Eating Healthy In The New Year?
The value of sensory analysis really comes to the forefront when it comes to healthy eating. Now that the New Year’s resolutions are passed and we are a few months into the New Year, let’s consider one of the most popular health food products out there, kale. The number of Americans consuming kale is six…
St. Patrick's Day
Every year, on March 17th, folks gather in green to drink pints of green beer in celebration of St. Patrick. We wondered: Why green beer? And who is St. Patrick? What are some typical St. Patrick’s Day food traditions? St. Patrick’s Day is thought to be more popular in North America than in the country…
Sensory Analysis: What is Flavor?
Flavor! There are many definitions for flavor, but all of them contain a combination of taste and odor influenced by sensations of pain, heat, cold and other tactile sensations. Most people have taste buds. Flavor has a major role in determining the acceptability of foods and beverages. It is a dynamic sense that changes in…
Diving into Flavoured Sparkling Water
As consumers seek out healthier beverage alternatives to soft drinks, they are finding increasingly more options in bottled water including new flavours and new fashionable or ‘greener’ packaging innovations. One exploding segment of the category we recently explored is flavoured sparkling water. The objective of our latest research was to investigate the sensory performance of…