Beyond Taste: How Premier Nutrition Uses Sensory Testing to Drive Better Product Decisions

Please note that the following transcript was generated automatically and may contain typos or summarization.

Keshia: Welcome to our webinar. I'm Keshia Peris, I lead customer enablement here at Highlight. If you're new to Highlight, we're a product testing platform that gets products into the hands of consumers to power decision-making across the new product development lifecycle. We cover usage, sensory, concept, claims, pack testing and more, and our software handles everything from recruiting to shipping and logistics to insight generation — so customers like you get nuanced physical product feedback in weeks, not months. Today is a customer spotlight built around one question: what does it take to consistently create products people love? I'm super excited to have Helen Joyner today, one of our longtime customers — we're big fans of Helen at Highlight, so grateful to have her joining us to talk trends in high-protein beverages. We'll go through sensory fundamentals and really get her perspective on turning sensory insights into product decisions. We'll save some time at the end for questions, so drop them in the chat anytime. Our guest, Helen Joyner, is Associate Principal Scientist, Sensory at Premier Nutrition, the team behind Premier Protein. She's a food scientist with more than ten years in research and sensory, a former professor of food science, and has a master's and PhD in food science from NC State. Helen, welcome!

Helen: Thank you.

Keshia: We're so excited you're here. Tell us a little bit more about your background, and specifically, I'd love to know how you ended up in sensory science.

Helen: The short answer is I kind of lateraled into it. I was interested in sensory science in grad school, but I ended up focusing more on food engineering — basically, how food gets prepared in an industry setting. I wanted to teach after grad school, so I did a postdoc, and then got a tenure-track job at the University of Idaho. I stayed there for six years, got tenure, and was eligible for sabbatical. I went on sabbatical to the Bay Area at Perfect Day, and within a week I realized I didn't want to get off sabbatical, so I stayed — and then I moved over to Premier Nutrition. Through that whole path I was doing sensory the entire time, but it wasn't really my focus until I got to Perfect Day, because when you look at how food is produced, sensory is right there with it — you have to make sure it still tastes good when you're producing it. That was basically me setting up a full sensory program for them. Then I moved to Premier Nutrition, and now I'm exclusively sensory.

Keshia: Awesome — you've started to scratch the surface there, and we're going to get into a lot more when it comes to your day-to-day, your role, and your perspective on sensory within the world of consumer insights. Before we get into that — off the clock question — what's a food or drink you're totally obsessed with right now?

Helen: I do love cookie dough, but there's this concoction I think I invented because I wanted mole sauce but was too lazy and cheap to go buy some: brown rice, butter, salt, garlic powder, and dark cocoa powder. I instant-pot the rice, mix the rest in — it's delicious. It sounds bonkers, but it totally works, and I had it for dinner last night.

Keshia: And when you mix all of that, are we getting more savory or more sweet?

Helen: It's definitely savory and salty, and you get that really nice dairy-fat flavor from the butter. Oil and olive oil don't taste the same — you really need butter.

Keshia: And how'd you come up with this?

Helen: I wanted mole sauce, and we were out, so I was just thinking about what's actually in mole sauce that I wanted — chocolate, so I wanted it savory, so salt, and I love butter, so I put that in. Then I tasted it and thought it needed something else, so I put in garlic — and that's been my recipe ever since.

Keshia: Speaking of trends, let's zoom out and set the stage for this conversation. Consumers have access to more information than ever — more recipes, more options. How do you think consumer expectations have changed when it comes to texture and taste within the world of protein? How are you seeing those trends evolve?

Helen: That's really evolved, especially over the past couple of years. The market is flooded with high-protein or protein-added products, and new ones are popping up all the time. Because consumers are exposed to that many different products and flavors, they now expect it to taste good and have a good texture — which sounds obvious, but "just chug it down and ignore the taste" used to be a real thing with high-protein drinks. Not ours, but I've seen plenty of Reddit threads that say "yeah, this tastes terrible, just chug it down, you need the protein." Consumers don't want to do that anymore. They want it to taste like whatever it's supposed to be flavored — chocolate milk should taste like chocolate milk, strawberries and cream should taste like strawberries and cream. They want a nice, smooth texture if it's a beverage, not chalky, astringent, or gritty. If it's cereal, they want it to crunch like cereal, not turn cardboardy or soggy. So they're a lot less tolerant of sensory issues than they used to be.

Keshia: I resonate with everything you said — I've had the experience of being excited to pull a high-protein product off the shelf, taking it home, and feeling let down by a chalky texture or aftertaste. Talk to me a bit about the distinction between "high protein" and "protein added" — that's new to me.

Helen: That's not so much sensory as positioning — though sensory does play a role, because it still has to taste good and we need to measure that. If you look at nutritional shakes, they're often positioned around the nutrients: here's the protein, here's the sugar, here's the added fiber. Something like Cheerios, as an example — the protein Cheerios have maybe 8 or 9 grams of protein, but they're still in the cereal aisle. They're saying "we have added protein, but we're still Cheerios, and we're still going to taste like Cheerios." That's really how I'd define the difference between those two categories.

Keshia: Going back to the role of sensory within the whole product experience — at Highlight we've seen a shift from just "does this product taste good" within a study, to understanding the whole consumer experience to make product decisions. What do you think is pushing sensory to matter more right now, specifically within the protein space?

Helen: There's increased competition, for sure — if you can switch brands and the other brand tastes better, why would you buy brand number one? So good taste, flavor, and texture are table stakes now. It can't just be "we have 30 grams of protein" — so does everybody else. As a baseline, it's got to taste good. And then there's the crowding in the category, plus the fact that TikTok and Instagram are a thing — people are posting "I love this brand, I can do this with this shake," and other people see an influencer using a brand and go try it. So that's also pushing sensory to the forefront, because we want to be the product the influencer likes, or the one that's pretty on Instagram.

Keshia: Where do you see brands often get the product experience wrong, or under-invest in sensory?

Helen: I see two primary issues. One is overriding it — sensory comes back and says "this doesn't taste as good as we thought," and then the business decides "we're too far in, we've already committed, we're going to launch" and it just gets overridden. Listen to your sensory team. The other issue is trying to pack too much into one test — wanting to measure liking, preference, a dozen attributes, packaging opinion, and nutritional opinion, all in the same test. Consumers aren't going to fill out a 20-minute survey; they'll get bored halfway through and start clicking. And sometimes how you set up one measurement isn't compatible with another thing you want to measure. You really need to think about your primary goal for that test — and if you have multiple primary goals, run multiple tests.

Keshia: I love that — objective and methodology go hand in hand. Can you break down what a sensory test specifically is, and how that's different from just getting feedback from consumers — sensory testing methodology versus a typical survey or iPad intercept?

Helen: A survey is like handing out free samples in a store and asking "do you like this, yes or no." Sensory science is an actual science — it deals with statistics a lot. Sensory software handles a lot of that, but you still need to know what you're doing and run the right statistical analysis. Because you're running stats, you need a large sample size — if you want overall liking, you don't ask 20 people, you ask 100 or more, and more if you want to segment (for example, chocolate lovers specifically). Another really important thing with sensory is completely anonymizing the product — take off all branding, don't tell anyone what it is, just give it a three-digit number and let them taste it as-is, because we don't want branding to affect their perception before they even taste it. And you have to be really good at survey science — you can't write a question that leads participants, even accidentally. For example, "this chocolate is the top-rated flavor of X — how much do you like this flavor?" already tells them it's top-rated. It comes down to even the difference between "how much do you like this sample" versus "what is your opinion of this sample" — the first already nudges toward a positive answer, while the second is pretty neutral.

Keshia: You mentioned testing a product that doesn't deliver on taste the way the team expected — how do you decide whether to move a product like that forward? How good is good enough?

Helen: You have to know how your category scores. For example, on a 9-point hedonic scale, milk scores around a 6, because it doesn't have much flavor — people don't hate it, it's just okay. For something like ice cream, you'd better be scoring an 8; if your ice cream scores a 6, you don't have good ice cream, because people love ice cream. So know where your category's supposed to fall, and that might mean doing some benchmarking to see how things are scoring. Given that, if you didn't hit your target, ask yourself whether the target was reasonable, and how much you missed it by — a couple tenths of a point versus a full point. If I set a target of 7.0 and scored 6.5, that might mean reworking it; if I scored 6.9, I was close, and I'd look at other factors to see if I can do a small tune-up of flavor or texture before deciding on the formula — comparing that with consumer data. That's how I'd start: how much did you miss it by, and were your expectations reasonable?

Keshia: I love that you mentioned the category layer. You've worked across a variety of dairy formats — can you talk about the difference in sensory attributes for a yogurt test versus a beverage test?

Helen: A lot of it is actually the same — you're still asking do you like the texture, do you like the thickness — but the scale is different for beverage versus yogurt. You'd ask the consumer basically the same questions, but if you have a trained panel evaluating attributes, that's when you start seeing real differences between beverages and yogurt — some attributes apply to beverages, some to yogurt, with a decent amount of crossover, but some wouldn't make sense in one versus the other, or you'd use a different product scale. Measuring thickness in yogurt and scoring a 3 on a 15-point scale is not the same as a 3 on the beverage scale.

Keshia: You mentioned trained panel — for those newer to sensory, can you talk about the difference between a trained panel and a consumer panel, and why you'd use one versus the other?

Helen: If you want liking — how much somebody likes it, which one they prefer — that's consumer testing, because consumers are really good at telling you what they like and don't like, but not good at describing why. I've seen a lot of fun stuff in verbatims from sensory tests with consumers. If you want to know how your product actually tastes — what it tastes like — you use a trained panel, trained on the category you want them to evaluate. When I was working on yogurt, they were trained in yogurt; now that I'm working on shakes, they're trained in shakes, and on different flavors and attributes — is it sweet, how intense is the flavor, and so on — and they score them on a linear scale. I can plot the results and say this sample has this shape, this other sample has this other shape, and that's where the samples differ, or how intense something is compared to what I expected.

Keshia: Have you seen examples where you used a trained panel and then a consumer panel in the same study, or vice versa?

Helen: The order kind of depends on who's available first, but you use them together. What you can do is take the consumer data and say "they liked this, but not this other thing," and then use the trained panel data to zoom in on what's showing up differently compared to a product they did like. You overlay the two products with the trained panel's results and say, for example, this yogurt that they liked less is a lot less sweet and has lower fruit flavor than the one they liked — maybe we should consider bumping those and retrying.

Keshia: I love that — there's real power in leveraging both to build a fuller, more holistic picture. You mentioned sample quality — we care a lot about that at Highlight with our community. Can you talk about what you look for in a high-quality community or panel, and what you'd want to be true in order to trust that data?

Helen: For a consumer panel — good panelists are descriptive and thoughtful. They take their time evaluating things instead of just clicking through, and for an in-home test, they're actually using the product as they would their regular one. If they normally drink their shake at lunch, they're drinking the test shake at lunch; if they eat yogurt on the couch watching TV, they're doing that with the test yogurt too. It's really the description and thoughtfulness that I like to see, because I know they're thinking about the product and giving me useful feedback.

Keshia: We know context matters so much in all of this — the panel, the environment they're in, really impacts the results and the insights on the back end. Last question before we move to audience questions — can you talk about the new product development lifecycle and where sensory fits along that?

Helen: The product development cycle is kind of the same as it always was for CPG — it's just really compressed. I see this all the time in food industry newsletters, that people are feeling the crunch. A lot of stuff is done in parallel now instead of in sequence — you might be running your sensory test at the same time you're getting packaging set up, front of pack, back of pack, and going through regulatory approval at the same time you're working on your marketing campaign. Everything's still happening, just much more quickly and often at the same time. It's a bummer when something changes on you mid-process during regulatory approval or package setup, but you just have to say, okay, that happened — what can we do, how can we work around this?

Keshia: Thank you, Helen, that was really helpful, and time has flown. A few things I'm taking away from this: taste isn't a bonus, it's the cost of entry in protein — and probably in every category these days. Every gram of protein changes the product, so sensory is really how you win that trade-off instead of guessing. And the fastest, most effective teams don't skip testing — they find ways to be agile instead. We've got a couple of audience questions before we wrap. First: for folks just getting into this field, are there any resources, books, or courses you'd recommend?

Helen: Yes — for courses, look at a university; they usually have a sensory science course, though it tends to be in person since it's hard to do online. There are also some short courses. For societies, the Society of Sensory Professionals is great, and IFT — the Institute of Food Technologists — has a Sensory and Consumer Sciences division; lots of people in both are very welcoming and helpful to new sensory scientists. For textbooks, there's one by Lawless and Heymann on sensory science — that's the one I have — and another good one, I believe by Meilgaard, Civille, and Carr. Both are great fundamentals of sensory science. And probably most importantly, find a mentor — someone who's been in sensory for a while, whether through your network or one of those societies, or someone who does contract work for your company. Get them as a mentor, ask questions, and get their advice — that's kind of how sensory knowledge gets passed down.

Keshia: That's a great list — we'll send it around in the follow-up. We probably have time for one last question, Helen, I'll let you choose it.

Helen: How much time do you allocate to testing in your compressed product roadmap? That's a constant sensory battle, because sensory wants time to do it right and compressed timelines say you've got to go fast — so it's really project-dependent, what you can squeeze in without wrecking your methodology. To do proper sensory, sensory has to be involved from the beginning and say, "this is how long sensory takes — how can we fit it in? If we can't fit it in, here's what I can do for you — are you willing to accept that?" Don't compromise your methodology because of a timeline; suggest a different methodology that may not work as well, but is still sound. It's better to have no data than unusable data.

Keshia: That's a great point — sometimes we get a little too creative, and sometimes it's just not possible, and we have to be honest about that. Thank you, everyone, for joining, and thank you so much, Helen. Keep an eye out in your inbox for the recording and Helen's resource list. If you'd like to learn more about Highlight and how we can help, go ahead and book a demo on our website. Thank you again, Helen — really appreciate the time. I'm sure everyone learned a ton in this short 30 minutes. Have a great rest of your day, everyone, and we'll see you soon.