While there are many variables for succeeding in the food industry, the list of essentials always starts with taste, texture and appearance. That is why ADM's trained Sensory Panel is a vital tool in understanding how ingredients affect the organoleptic properties of food products, from the moment they are produced to the moment they are consumed. Whether you want to replicate the taste of a competitive brand, substitute more affordable or available ingredients into your existing formulations, incorporate healthier nutraceutical ingredients, or improve product flavours and textures - ADM's Sensory Panel can help.
The ADM descriptive flavour panel is specially trained to detect a variety of distinct flavours, aromas and textures in food products, and the intensity of each. They must then be able to describe each by name, using an agreed-upon lexicon so their findings can be meaningfully compiled into group conclusions and the data analysed. In the light of these stringent requirements, it is easy to see why only one in ten applicants is accepted for the ADM Sensory Panel.
ADM's descriptive panel can give you a competitive edge. Our panellists can identify the flavours in a competitive product, giving you a benchmark to replicate or surpass. If requested and provided with adequate product information, ADM can work with customers to asses the limits of a product's shelf life. Utilizing our descriptive panel, ADM has gained valuable insights into the best ways to incorporate our ingredients into your food applications, to help you develop the most desirable products possible.
The most basic function of ADM's sensory programme is arguably the most vital: maintaining the consistently high quality of the ADM ingredients you use. Towards that end, ADM evaluates the sensory quality of many key ingredients, such as sweeteners and protein isolate - in-plant - on an ongoing basis.
ADM also conducts other types of sensory and guidance testing with larger groups of regular consumers as the panel. "Discrimination tests" illustrate whether the panel can determine the difference between two similar products. This can tell you, for instance, whether an ingredient substitution will produce a noticeable change in your existing brand's familiar flavour. "Preference tests," as the name implies, simply ask the untrained subjects to tell us which of the products they tasted, they liked the best.
Tests like these, often conducted with 100 to 200 subjects, can give you the firm guidance needed on how to improve your processes or reduce ingredient costs with confidence. Similarly, they can also give you a valuable early indication of what to expect from more extensive - and expensive - full-scale testing, potentially producing large savings.
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