Taste Tests: Changing the Rules to Improve the Game

In the food industry, taste tests are an important element in product development, test marketing and advertising. The primary factor detracting from the reliability of taste tests is guessing by subjects; it confounds true discrimination and preference with random responses. In this paper simple modifications of discrimination and preference tests are suggested. Easily implemented, these changes do not increase the costs of the test while greatly reducing the probability of a subject guessing correctly. Two experiments to check the effect of these changes on task difficulty were carried out. Results show that there may be some increase in respondent's task difficulty, but this increase is overshadowed by the increased reliability of the suggested test design.