Evaluating Food Products These icons indicate that detailed teacher’s notes or useful web addresses are available in the Notes Page. This icon indicates the slide contains activities created in Flash. These activities are not editable. This icon indicates the slide contains activities created in Flash. These activities are not editable. For more detailed instructions, see the Getting Started presentation. For more detailed instructions, see the Getting Started presentation.

How do we judge food? That’s obvious – we just taste it… Don’t we? It’s a bit more complicated than that… Before we put the food in our mouths, we use: our eyes to judge how it looks our noses to judge how it smells, and sometimes our fingers to pick it up and judge its texture.

Our senses

Why evaluate food? We need to evaluate food products for several reasons: Testing existing products – before we design products of our own, it is a good idea to test products that already exist. Testing recipes – when we develop a recipe we need to test the prototypes to find out whether they are successful. Testing final products – we need to evaluate the food products we produce so that we can judge how successful they are and decide how we could improve them.

Describing food

Sensory tests Sensory tests involve giving people samples of food and asking them to use their senses to judge its: appearance taste smell texture. Mmm. That tastes and smells great, it looks crunchy, and I love crunchy food. Not sure I fancy that. Smells a bit spicy for me, and looks like you’d need a hammer to crack it. The trouble is, they are both looking at the same plate of food. People like different things. This makes the data from tests like these subjective – a matter of opinion.

Paired comparison This test judges two products on just one characteristic at a time. It makes the test more objective. Which orange is juicier? A B  A B

Triangle tests This test judges three samples, but two of them are the same. Let’s say you’ve made a low fat version of your favourite chocolate cake. You put out two slices of the original cake and one slice of the new version, and ask tasters to name the odd one out to see if they can tell the difference. Which is the odd one out? A B C A B C

Ranking and scoring tests List these in order of preference with the one you like best as 1. 3 1 2 A B C Ranking A B C Give each food a mark out of 5, where 5 means you like it a lot, and 1 means you don’t like it at all. A B C 2 5 3 Scoring A B C

Comparing the results Spreadsheets help us present our results as tables or charts. Results of scoring test for cakes A and B Bar chart Star diagram

A test about tests

Comparing products

Summary We evaluate food products to: analyse existing products test recipes and prototypes evaluate our own products and decide how successful we were in meeting our design brief. Sensory tests judge foods for taste, smell, appearance and texture. Types of test include: paired comparison tests triangle tests ranking tests scoring tests.