Capabilities
The right test, correctly powered, honestly read.
Sensory science only compounds in value when it is consistent — across plants, panels and years. Every engagement starts with one question: what decision are you trying to make?
Consistency across lots, lines and plants.
Batch & plant comparison
Different plants, panels and regions produce non-comparable data unless the program itself is engineered. We build the protocol — sample handling, coding, presentation, panel calibration — so a lot from Ontario and a lot from Brazil can sit in the same analysis. Then we run the test that matches your risk: a tetrad when you need power, a duo-trio when a reference is natural, descriptive analysis when you need to know which attribute moved.
Tetrad · duo-trio · descriptive analysis · universal SOPs across sites
Sensory shelf life
Traditional cutoffs treat consumer rejection as a fixed threshold. It is a distribution. A probabilistic technique — presented at the 10th Pangborn Symposium and implemented in North American meat plants — gives you the day at which a chosen share of consumers reject, with its confidence band.
Sensory shelf life · consumers still accepting
Read: A “best by” at day 45 would put half your consumers past their rejection point a week early. Day 35 holds 60% acceptance with margin.
Formulation decisions with a number behind them.
Reformulation & cost-out
Supplier changes, ingredient substitutions and cost reductions tested against the current product. A consumer product-matching protocol developed for highly variable systems such as meats — where lot-to-lot noise swamps naive tests — delivered $1 million in savings.
Formulation optimization
How much cheese and how much bacon maximizes liking in a stuffed burger? Too little and the product is unremarkable; too much and cost, structure and appeal all suffer. Response surface methodology treats it as the designed-experiment problem it is — the approach behind a U.S. patent.
Difficult populations
Adult scales don’t transfer to children. With the Kansas State University Sensory and Consumer Research Center, a validated technique for measuring school-aged children’s acceptance of reduced-sodium foods.
What consumers accept, prefer and believe.
Acceptance & competitive benchmarking
Central location and home-use tests with liking, purchase intent and attribute diagnostics — against your current product, the category leader, or both. Read for significance where it matters, segmented where preferences split, and delivered in consumer language where that helps R&D.
Concept, packaging & claims
Concepts — does the idea land before you invest in formulation? Packaging — shelf standout, comprehension, appeal. Health claims — which are believed, which quietly damage trust. Pricing perception. Max-diff and TURF where you need to choose among many options: at St. Jude that meant 140 tested message options from one study.
CLT · HUT · max-diff · TURF · preference segmentation · Jobs-to-be-Done