Our perception of food and drink involves all of our senses in one way or another. Taste, smell, texture, colour, shape, feel, even the sound something makes when we bite into it or pour it all contribute to the way we perceive a product. Many northern Europeans wouldn’t dream of eating Italian black bread, but if you blindfold them they’ll find it hard to tell apart from standard breads.
Not surprisingly the science of sensory perception is very important to the food industry. No one wants to invest thousands or even millions of euro in the development of a product that people will find revolting on some instinctual level.
In recognition of the growing importance of sensory food science to the industry, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has established the Sensory Food Network Ireland to promote the integration of sensory science activities on the island of Ireland. The network comprises leading institutions with expertise in sensory science from the island of Ireland. The partners include the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute, Belfast; University College Cork; University College Dublin; Dublin Institute of Technology; College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, Co Tyrone; St Angela's College, Sligo; Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology; University of Ulster; Northern Ireland Centre for Food and Health; and Limerick Institute of Technology.
It is hoped the network, which is being co-ordinated by Teagasc, will become an integral part of the food and beverage industry by supporting new product development through services such as product matching, consumer acceptance and flavour chemistry.
The Sensory Food Network Ireland will have a dual role to play in serving the Irish food industry. Firstly, it will provide a specialist service to the marketing, development and manufacture of new and modified food products. It will monitor competition by evaluating new and current competitive products, measuring new product differences as a function of scale-up, and measuring sensory differences as a consequence of lowering production costs or ingredient or packaging variables.
Secondly, it will involve a research role in improving the methodology of testing, devising the most appropriate tests for real-time problems and improving the expertise in flavour chemistry and sensometric methodologies.
Fragmented
“There already exists substantial activity in the partner institutions with regard to sensory-related research,” says Teagasc senior research officer Dr
Eimear Gallagher
. “However, their activities were fragmented up until now. The industry highlighted a gap in this area of product development and the formation of this national network will bring together a critical mass of activity in a broad range of sensory-related disciplines such as consumer behaviour, food formulation, food safety, preference mapping and so on.
“We have built a really good group which is integrating all the different capabilities, while promoting excellence in research and offering a sensory service to the industry,” she says.
Gallagher says the food industry needs good scientifically based information in relation to sensory perception when developing new products. It might be the case that a company simply wishes to match the taste characteristics of a product already on the market or it may be that they wish to create a product to meet known consumer preferences in a particular market.
“It’s how we perceive food with all our senses,” she says. “At the moment we are training tasting panels to pick up flavours and ingredients in foods. But it is more than just taste. The texture and physical properties are also important. We squeeze bread to assess its freshness, for example. There are also the volatile compounds which influence flavour and give things like curry and coffee their aromas.”
Perceptions
Packaging matters as well. “If a product is not packaged properly it will go off, but consumers can have different perceptions of packaging. At one stage people didn’t particularly like buying milk in tetra packs and believed that the bottled product was superior. It’s just a matter of perception.”
This also applies to meats. For a long time people believed the meat from the butcher’s counter had to be superior in quality to the packed cuts available in the chill cabinet, despite the fact those packaged cuts came directly from the butcher’s counter. Similarly, consumers find the darker colour of vacuum packed meat cuts hard to accept.
This area of consumer idiosyncrasies is among the most important for the network.
“Consumers perceive certain foods as tasteful and healthy, and we want to understand why they perceive them in that way,” Gallagher says.
“And quite often it is small things that you wouldn’t think should matter that make all the difference. Crisps is one example. The colours of the packaging affect our taste and we associate certain flavours with specific pack colours.
Environments
“Also, when you serve foods in different environments it can have an effect on taste and other sensory perceptions. In our sensory lab we serve food under green and red lights to see how that affects taste.”
This work is particularly important for Irish companies developing new products for export markets.
“We do crosscultural studies for different markets as well,” says Gallagher. “In countries like China, consumers have very different taste preferences, and there are marked differences across Europe as well. We will have a number of PhD students engaged in the study of different preferences and palettes across the world in order to support the industry in the creation and development of products to meet those taste expectations.”
The Food Sensory Network is now up and running and is reaching out to the industry. “Companies can come to us with a new product they wish to develop or one they wish to change and we will work with them to achieve what they are looking for,” Gallagher says.
“We will take the product and come up with recommendations for what might be done to achieve the desired sensory perception without compromising safety or quality.”
sensoryfoodnetworkireland.ie
