Taste test panels: Are they right for your brand?

Our tastes and preferences for foods vary widely, depending on our culture and upbringing, the particularities of our taste receptor genes, and how hungry we are at a given moment. This makes it challenging to test whether your new snack, dessert, or beverage will get people hooked.

Many food and beverage companies rely on trained tasters working in highly controlled environments to determine how well something might hit the target taste-wise. Even the ambient noise and lighting may be standardized, and tasters will often repeat the same analysis task multiple times for consistency.

But is all this really worth the effort? Here, we’ll discuss the real costs and challenges of traditional taste test panels and present some modern alternatives that deliver faster, more affordable consumer insights.

Why you can’t skimp on taste evaluation (even for health foods)

With all the health-conscious messaging on snacks, functional beverages, and even some desserts, you could be forgiven for thinking that there’s a non-negligible subset of consumers who really do prioritize nutritional value and healthfulness over taste.

But that’s simply not true. Even consumers who are trying to eat healthily will ultimately make their choices based on taste. Studies show that, even with this cohort, flavor-focused messaging like “chili-garlic roasted broccoli” will lead to more purchases than claims like “low sugar” or “30% fewer calories.”

So, taste is king. And there are so many different possible points of failure: Your frozen entrée might have a fantastic masala, but someone might bail on your brand if the chicken tikka pieces themselves lack flavor.

Even worse, off-flavors may result from certain compounds at concentrations of just a few parts-per-billion (ppb). For instance, humans can detect the presence of geosmin, a harmless compound that can give foods like farmed fish an unpleasant musty odor, at just 0.1 ppb.

If you fail to perform the requisite taste and sensory testing on your product launch, you’ll disappoint your buyers immensely, despite some curious shoppers lured in by the messaging. And when people don’t like something, they won’t buy it again—nor any of your other products, possibly. You may have just lost a customer for life.

So, what exactly is a taste test panel?

A taste test panel, also known as a sensory panel, comprises a group of people who are responsible for tasting variations of a product (or competing products) and then offering feedback. These people can either be professional taste testers or regular consumers who may or may not complete a short training session.

If the panel involves professionals, then the number of testers will be much smaller. This is because taste experts must go through rigorous training to be able to describe flavors in detail and understand how their own biases affect their perception. You can get a lot of nuanced sensory data this way, but you’ll have a harder time representing the full range of your target customers.

With a consumer taste panel, you’ll have much more representation. These will often take place in research centers or focus group facilities, although they can sometimes happen in stores or restaurants too.

Food and beverage companies use taste testing market research not only to see how well new flavors perform, but also to determine when taste first starts to perceptibly degrade due to loss of freshness.

How to run a taste test panel

The first step is to make sure you have enough participants. For a consumer panel, 80-100 is a good number to ensure statistical significance. For an expert panel, you’ll probably have a dozen people at most.

Consistency is key. Blind your samples and present them in as similar a way as possible—same container, same temperature, same amount, same exact shape if you’re giving people a cut of something solid. You’ll need to code the samples so that you can identify them later, but this coding shouldn’t relay any info to the testers.

Make sure that your instructions for tasting the samples are very clear; you want people to be focusing on the flavor and not wondering whether they’re doing things right. Then you’ll have people fill out a taste test survey with the following types of questions:

• Descriptive analysis questions. Use standardized flavor descriptors to figure out which specific tastes come across in your sample. Given that the average person may not have the vocabulary or the training, you’ll go into less detail with a consumer panel as opposed to an expert panel.
• Hedonic questions. Have participants rate how much they like each sample. This is good for non-experts since it doesn’t involve any specialized jargon, but people’s perceptions can also be influenced by a lot of factors that are hard to control for.
• Discrimination questions. Find out whether people can actually tell the difference between the different samples.

You’ll need to decide whether you want to do monadic testing (only show one sample to each group of testers), comparison testing (have everyone try each sample in a randomized order), or triangle testing (give each person three samples, two of which are the same thing, and see if people can tell which is the odd one out).

Downsides of taste testing panels

Perhaps the most obvious issue with these sorts of product testing panels is that they’re costly and complicated to run. Even with a simple consumer panel, you’ll still be investing a lot in the setup, the location, the recruitment, and the sample prep.

When you work with taste experts, the costs go up significantly, and can be prohibitive for emerging and mid-market brands. You have the added disadvantage that you’re probably not representing your target demographics very well.

But the most important downside is one that’s endemic to focus groups in general—there’s simply a lack of authenticity. Nobody goes to a bland office park building lodged between three crisscrossing freeways to have a beer. As a result, you’re not getting any real information on how well your product hits the spot in the types of situations people would naturally enjoy it in.

This is where in-home usage testing makes a big difference. By getting data from real customers—and not just a few of them—in the comfort of their own homes, you’ll get much more nuanced and authentic insights.

IHUT as an alternative to the traditional taste test panel

What if we told you that you can get copious, highly accurate sensory testing for your products in a way that’s also easy and cost-effective?

Highlight’s IHUT services include end-to-end logistics management and a wide-ranging group of committed product testers who will give you honest, detailed feedback within just days of the study’s beginning.

Even better, since people are completing the testing steps on their own time, you’ll get a lot more nuance in the open-ended feedback. This can be incredibly valuable. Brands often get their best marketing slogans from the words of their customers!

What about the cost of shipping products out to dozens of testers’ homes, you may ask? Wouldn’t a regular consumer panel via central location testing (CLI) actually be cheaper? This is one of those “being cheap is actually expensive” scenarios—you might save money upfront, but there are loads of benefits you’re not getting with CLI:

• You’re reaching a smaller sample size versus being able to ship out 100+ units.
• You’re reaching only a specific region, and you’re essentially ignoring everyone who lives anywhere else.
• You’re not getting any longitudinal data (information about how people perceive your product over time).
• You’re not actually gathering data in context—a major research faux pas that can lead to high costs down the road. If your data hasn’t been collected in a test subject’s organic environment and within their daily routines, you can’t really trust it.

And a quick reminder that logistics can get a lot cheaper when you’re working with an IHUT partner who has years of experience streamlining the process.

IHUT for sensory testing—we make it easy

Testers get detailed yet easy-to-follow directions from within the Highlighter app and via email. For example, they might be instructed to: “in week 1, make dinner with Broth A. In week 2, follow the same recipe with Broth B.”

You can choose how long you want the testing to go on for. With IHUT, it’s just as easy to have everyone sample everything in a single afternoon versus having them take one small nibble each day for 10 days.

If you’re looking to taste-test things meant for children, no problem! We helped applesauce and fruit juice brand Tree Top figure out which SKUs they should prioritize for stores based on detailed feedback from 75 parent-and-child pairs. Even better, the results were in within a week.

Get the insights that really matter—and shed the unnecessary costs

Traditional taste panels can be very helpful, especially when it comes to devising and verifying taste descriptors in your messaging or determining how far off your “Best By” dates should be. But if you’re simply trying to see what people love, IHUT outperforms the other options in a variety of metrics.

To summarize: You’ll get your results faster, you’ll be able to easily recruit per your target demographic, and you’ll get more authentic feedback. Plus, it’s much cheaper. What’s not to love?

Next time you’re developing a new product or making some changes to an existing one, have us run your samples by our testing audience and we’ll give you the data you need to feel confident in your product launch!