DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS: COMPARATION BETWEEN METHODOLOGIES

Abstract

Sensory descriptive methods are very important in food industry to define the sensory quality of food products. The Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA®) is a method very used to identify and to quantify the sensory characteristics of foods. The stages of QDA® are: recruitment and screening of judges, generation and description of sensory characteristics, training and final selection of the judges and evaluation of the products. Since the QDA® requires extensive training of judges, a new descriptive methodology for ranking was developed recently. In this method some stages are equal to QDA®, but training and final selection not happen. The evaluation of the products is accomplished by ranking of samples for each sensory attribute. The descriptive method by ranking is faster and economical. This study compared the new method with the traditional method (QDA®) through sensory description of cheesecurd. Four brands were evaluated. The sensory characteristics were defined by the judges are: characteristic color, characteristic aroma, characteristic ? avor, sweet taste, salty taste, rancid , flavor, consistency and viscosity. There was significant correlation (p<0.05) among methodologies for 62.5% of the sensory characteristics. Thus, when the purpose is to identify sensory differences more pronounced the ranking method can be used to replace the QDA®.
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