Wednesday, January 04, 2012
21st Sensory Inc. Qualifies 8 New Panelists
by Coleen Hambrick
21st Sensory Inc. celebrated the addition of eight new employees on Nov. 16.
Mary Anderson, Sally Ashe, Marilyn Boone, Laurie Cook, Tamari Guthrie, Wendy Hall, Stephanie McCartney and Anna Shaw received certificates after successfully completing 120 hours of intensive training in food and beverage flavor and aroma and SkinSensory analysis, qualifying them as professional sensory analysts with the Bartlesville-based company, 21st Sensory Inc.
Each candidate was selected after meeting rigid criteria that included a written screening test, a variety of aroma and flavor acuity tests, and one-on-one interviews.
Training covered learning to recognize and measure food and beverage flavors and textures. With more than 10,000 identified flavor compounds, review and practice are ongoing during the course of a panelist’s career. In addition to being trained to assess foods, the new analysts were trained to assess non-food products such as shampoos and lotions.
Kathleen Rutledge, president and founder of 21st Sensory, said, “Our flavor and skin sensory panelists are regarded as humans trained to perform as highly calibrated instruments.”
While there are mechanical instruments available to perform measurements of volatiles in foods, beverages and skin-and-hair products, none have been developed that accurately mimic the integration of perceptions that occur in the human brain. Also, humans are highly sensitive to some sensory signals that cannot be measured with instruments.
“The aroma of geosmin smells like damp, unventilated basements. We can detect geosmin at parts per billion, an amount usually not measurable on instruments,” said Rutledge. “Yet that tiny amount could ruin a batch of bottled water.”