Sensometrics for Food Quality Control

The industrial development of innovative and succesful food items and the measuring of food quality in general is difficult without actually letting human beings evaluate the products using their senses at some point in the process. The use of humans as measurement instruments calls for special attention in the modelling and data analysis phase. In this paper the focus is on sensometrics – the „metric“ side of the sensory science field. The sensometrics field is introduced and related to the fields of statistics, chemometrics and psychometrics. Some of the most commonly used sensory testing methods are introduced and some of the corresponding sensometrics methods reviewed and discussed.