While there are many variables for succeeding in the food industry, the list of essentials always starts with taste, texture and appearance. That's why ADM's trained Sensory Panel is a vital tool to our customers and our employees in understanding how ingredients affect the organoleptic properties of food products, from the moment they're produced to the moment they're consumed. ADM’s Sensory Panel can replicate the taste of a competitive brand, substitute more affordable or available ingredients into your existing formulations, incorporate more healthful nutraceutical ingredients, determine or extend shelf life and can even improve product flavors and textures
The ADM descriptive flavor panel is specially trained to detect a variety of distinct flavors, aromas and textures in food products, and the intensity of each. To qualify, panelists 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 analyzed. In light of these stringent requirements, it's easy to see why only one in 10 applicants is accepted for the ADM Sensory Panel.
ADM's descriptive panel can give you a competitive edge. Our panelists can identify the flavors in a competitive product, giving you a benchmark to replicate or surpass. If requested and provided adequate product information, ADM can work with the customer to assess the limits of the 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 program is arguably the most vital: maintaining the consistently high quality of the ADM ingredients you use. Toward that end, ADM evaluates the sensory quality of key ingredients, such as sweeteners and protein isolate, in-plant on an ongoing basis.
ADM conducts other types of sensory and guidance testing with larger groups of regular consumers as the testers. "Discrimination tests" illustrate whether testers can tell 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 flavor. "Preference tests," as the name implies, simply ask the untrained subjects to tell us which of the tasted products they like better.
Tests like these, often conducted with 100 to 200 subjects, can give you the concrete assurance to improve your processes or reduce ingredient costs with confidence. By the same token, they can also give you a valuable early indication of what to expect from more extensive—and expensive—full-scale testing, potentially saving you thousands.
Only a company of ADM's scope and resources can add value to an already excellent ingredient portfolio by providing vital services like these. It's another reason why the Food Processing 2003 Reader's Choice Awards named ADM as the industry's #1 pick for Technical Service, Customer Service, Product Consistency, and Overall Best in the Commodity Ingredients and Nutritional Ingredients categories.
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