Questionnaires

A questionnaire may be completely appropriate for one family of products, and completely inappropriate or only incomplete for another family. This may be true even within fairly similar products. We understand, for example, that the descriptors used to describe the color of a wine or its olfactory notes will most likely be different between a red wine and a rosé wine within the same appellation.

A food product, apart from perhaps waters, are often very complex products in visual, olfactory and taste terms, without taking into account questions of texture and aftertaste; it therefore seems pointless or remains very incomplete to be able to describe products well, because of this complexity with only 5 to 6 descriptors. This is why it seems reasonable to start with a range of 10 to 20 descriptors depending on the type of product.

A sensory evaluation is an exercise requiring prior training and training to recognize, name and quantify olfactory or taste intensities.

A questionnaire is a sum of questions represented by the descriptors, and all these questions represent a work of memorization, but above all a significant physiological effort, by the saturation and the sensory fatigue caused.

Too narrow scales, for example in 5 points (1 to 5) or 6 points (0 to 5) can induce a lot of biases, the most important are called limit biases because people who have already put a value weak or strong, will then not be able to distinguish other products by a weaker or stronger notation by this number of modalities or too restricted intensity gradients. Also, the panelists may tend to group their rating on the single point representing the middle of the scale.

Yes, free comments in a questionnaire represent another more open way of answering than the closed questions defined by the descriptors. This way makes it possible to complete the product information which could not have been expressed by the descriptors, to specify points addressed by the descriptors, to name a defect on a sample which could move the whole rating, and above all to let the judge express himself so as not to leave him feeling frustrated by not taking into account his own complementary personal assessment of the questionnaire.

The studies making it possible to link the results of appreciation resulting from consumer tests and the results of description in sensory analysis are based on the statistical comparison of data structures, by considering often rather complex models.

The purpose of the Flash© profile technique is to discriminate between products using the individual vocabularies of the panelists questioned, but we can see that similarly to the statistical comparison of data structure between consumer tests and sensory analysis to arrive at a model, the model in Flash© profile is based on the reconciliation of data structure between each judge on the basis of the products to arrive at a common discrimination model between the judges. This also presupposes in a similar way a sufficient number of products, greater than 5 in simultaneous presentation, to obtain a certain reliability in the construction of the results.