“Flash profile” method for descriptive sensory evaluation of chocolates with untrained evaluators.

Abstract

In recent years, techniques have been developed to describe the sensory attributes of food products that allow training time to be eliminated and thus minimize the costs involved in the training and maintenance from a group of trained tasters, since these new methods allow the use of human without training. One of these modern techniques is the “Flash Profile” method. The objective of this research was to evaluate the performance of this method using consumers in the sensory evaluation of chocolate samples, comparing it with the description obtained with trained tasters through a Quantitative Descriptive Analysis. Similar descriptions were obtained by both methods, the samples evaluated were clearly differentiated, the spaces generated by both methods have a great similarity, with an RV vector correlation coefficient of 0,76; obtained by Generalized Procrustes Analysis. The Flash Profile provided greater semantic richness, but not in all cases were terms discriminatory between the samples. In practical terms, the Flash Profile is fast, with an evaluation scale that is easy to understand, although it is laborious and requires specialized knowledge in multivariate statistical techniques.