It is certain that in the case of product development, the management team of a company must have a role of animation and orientation of the projects, but the selection of the products, in particular, those intended for children or teenagers, or even intended for pets can, of course, only be carried out with panelists who represent the intended consumer target.
Equipment of the 'electronic nose' type can play an important role in continuous monitoring operations for certain products that lend themselves to this type of monitoring, and in the search for previously identified molecules. It is certain, however, that these means cannot detect or interpret defects not previously identified, and moreover, cannot claim to describe products or even evaluate texture sensations.
Internal panelists should be considered as people trained to constitute sensory measurement instruments for issues of discrimination and description. The appreciation depends on the tastes of each one, and these are very variable according to the people, by their family environment, their experience, their age, their status... This appreciation can only be requested from people to whom the products are intended, taking into account all these differences, and consequently with a minimum of people for a good representativeness, but also, without being under the influence of knowledge of the company's products.
Without calling into question these standards which have the merit of existing, it is sometimes necessary to adapt them to products which require specific evaluation practices or particular consumption conditions. Budgetary reasons or questions related to the number of panelists or quantities of products available must also sometimes be taken into account to make the least biased evaluation by prioritizing, for example, in the case of very expensive samples or samples limited in quantities.
During an evaluation session, each product evaluated has a greater or lesser influence on the other samples, it is thus necessary to avoid too different evaluations to avoid masking one product by another which would be stronger in olfactory or taste notes or with very high afterglow effects; one can for example think that it is not desirable to evaluate cooked cheeses with very powerful cheeses.
Sensory analysis brings together two very different areas, the first concerns good practices for carrying out tests during the preparation of the tests and during the evaluation sessions in order to avoid any bias that would distort the results. The second area of expertise concerns statistics; they are essential to allow a smoothing of the results with the taking into account of all the results of the panelists and a reliable decision support using the tests of hypotheses.
A triangular test is usually used with experts to answer a question of difference or similarity between two products. These experts are rarely representative of the target for which these products are intended, and moreover can be influenced by internal products, and the panelists called are generally too few, from 10 to 30, where it would take at least 60 people, to an assessment test. It is for all these reasons that asking a question of preference to experts is really useless, or even worse, can mislead the people who will see the results.