PETpla.net Insider 07+08 / 2010

BEVERAGE PREPARATION 30 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 07+08/10 www.petpla.net The Good Taste Guide Taste is at the heart of any successful product in the food and beverage industry. Getting the right flavour is a complex process and Rudolf Wild GmbH & Co KG has invested a lot of time and effort into getting it right – not least, adapting to different preferences in different countries. New and innovative products are always of interest – but if they don’t hit the mark with the paying public then they can hardly be counted as suc- cessful. It may be a blindingly obvious statement but customers will only buy products they like; the challenge, in the food and beverage industry, is to develop something you will be con- fident the customer will like before it ever hits the shelves. Some aspects look straightfor- ward; if it’s too salty, too sweet or too sharp, then it won’t work, nor if it isn’t salty, sweet or sharp enough. But what about taste? It varies a lot between countries. Take vanilla, for example. It’s a widespread ingredient, almost as common as wheatflour or sugar. But the word covers a multi- tude of subtle differences. There are around 60 different types of it, with Bourbon vanilla (v. planifola) from Madagascar being the most common. But in Europe alone, there are ten dif- ferent flavours: the British prefer theirs with a caramel taste; the Germans like it creamy. The French don’t use Bourbon vanilla at all, preferring the savoury aniseed tang of v. tahitensis, from Tahiti. Hitting the right spot How does a food and beverage manufacturer ensure their blend of fla- vours and textures hits the right spot? Rudolf Wild GmbH & Co KG (Wild) says that it understands food sensory analysis as a competitive factor and integrates it into product development. Established food industry method- ology such as comparison tests, descriptive tests and consumer tests take place at various points during development and help to optimise success rates of innovative products. However, it is ultimately about taste and human perception – so the ulti- mate test instruments aren’t mechani- cal, electrical or chemical; they are human beings. But people are individuals and using them to test products in sen- sory analyses can create subjective perceptions, which lead to results being more widely varied than would be the case with technical measur- ing instruments. For that reason, sensory decisions are always based on group results – a triangle test, for example, will involve at least 24 to 30 tasters. Disruptive influences must be minimized, so testers have special, sealed tasting stations. Tasters must be neither hungry nor full, they must have plenty of time for tasting and the environment has to be stress-free. The vanilla “spiderweb”: Taste varies a lot between countries. Vanilla for example covers a lot of subtle differences.