Source: Radio New Zealand
Christina Roigard and Dr Roger Harker Wara Bullot
Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Entering the sensory booths at the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s consumer testing facility is an odd experience. It’s quiet – not completely silent, but definitely dampened. When I visit it’s kind of dark, the illumination in the room has a red tinge.
Christina Roigard, team leader in the health and consumer sciences team said it’s a room with limited external influences, “So people can come in and really experience the product they’re tasting. It’s a unique environment.”
The coloured lighting helps mask the colour of the product being tasted, so people don’t see something green, for example, and expect it to be sour.
Sensory booths where consumers test food, like kiwifruit, have limited external influences so testers can focus entirely on taste. Zespri
“You might have seen some lovely red kiwifruit come to the market in the last couple of years and as we’re going through the process of finding the right one to put to market, we want consumers to really focus on the flavour and the texture and not be too distracted by the exciting gorgeous colours they’re seeing,” said Roigard.
Interpreting taste
The studies done here at the consumer testing facility have been refined over time.
Principal scientist Dr Roger Harker said back in the 1980s, when the team was first set up, they had expert tasters who were screened to be sensitive to flavours and had good vocabulary to explain their taste experience.
“Then you went through and trained them on a set of samples, almost like you were expecting people to be little machines,” he said.
But he says new methods, like the CATA (Check All That Apply) questionnaires which have largely been developed here in New Zealand, mean testers can now be more representative of the general consumer.
He said with this method, “We get really precise information just from general people.”
While we talked a lot about fruit, the team do consumer testing on a wide variety of products, like cheese, wine and fish. 123RF
Flavour worlds
“People live in their own flavour worlds,” said Roigard, “How they experience flavour and aroma differs depending on who you are. It doesn’t mean you will like or dislike something more than another person but just that your experience is genuinely different.”
With this in mind, consumers are asked to rate the food they’re tasting with a ‘just about right scale’.
And this means that while a new fruit, for example, might not have been to the group’s taste, if it was just about right it can be fed back to the growers or breeders and they can make decisions based on that.
“We know with fruit especially there’s some variability that happens anyway,” said Roigard.
Future fruit
One of the exciting parts of the work being done by Roigard and the team is finding future fruit flavours.
Because they don’t yet have an actual piece of fruit, they use essences created by colleagues within the flavoromics team at the Bioeconomy Science Institute to test on consumers.
Scientist David Jin is heavily involved in this work and looking at how to make the experience for testers more like the real thing.
David Jin is working on enhancing the tasting experience for consumers testing new flavours. Wara Bullot
They do this with things like making consumers look at an image of the fruit before drinking the essence and adding texture to the liquid so there is something to bite into, kind of like a miniature version of a boba tea.
“We try to build different layers around that drink. Imagine like several different layers of bubbles around it,” Jin said.
Cart before the horse?
While it might seem strange to pick the taste you want before you have even grown the fruit, Roigard says the flavour profiles are there – they might just not be in a perfect package.
“It may be a fruit that doesn’t look particularly good, but it tastes amazing. Or it doesn’t store particularly well but it has these flavour attributes,” she said.
So if consumers like the flavour, they can help the growers decide if it’s worth focusing on breeding those fruits with other more beneficial attributes.
“There’s a couple [of essence flavours] that we think would be so exciting if there was a fruit that tasted like this,” said Roigard.
Sign up to the Our Changing World monthly newsletter for episode backstories, science analysis and more.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
