All types of Product Testing
Sensory Panel testing can be extremely valuable to many marketers and researchers as well as to product developers. This expert panel can be used in many phases of product development or maintenance; and make consumer testing more efficient by identifying products that are very similar. Even though the panel of testers is small in number, they are trained to detect small differences on a vast range of taste and flavour dimensions, for example, they can describe fruit yogurts in 45-55 dimensions.
Sensory panels are most effective when they can evaluate products, and changes in products, without having the expense of repeated testing amongst consumers. The first stage of this process is use multivariate analysis techniques to correlate product assessments for benchmark products on both the panel and amongst consumers. Having developed this relationship, sensory panels can be used in the early stages of new product development prior to assessment amongst consumers or to regularly track factory output for specification deviation.