CATA Method to Obtain Additional Information for Sensory Shelf-Life: Is It Wise to Discard Terms?

Abstract

A food has not shelf-life by itself; it´s depends on the interaction food/consumer. For that reason, consumers are the most important tool in determining the shelf-life of a product (Giménez, Ares and Ares, 2012; Hough et al., 2002).From a consumer-based approach, the sensory shelf-life of a product is considered as the period of time during which the food is acceptable until the last consumer (Giménez et al., 2012). The estimation of the sensory shelf-life of a food basically consists of evaluating the sensory characteristics of a group of samples with different storage times. Among the methods to do this, the acceptability limit is about estimation of sensory shelf-life based on consumer acceptability data, collected using a hedonic scale (Giménez et al., 2012). Shelf-life is determined as the time in which the first significant difference in acceptability scores is obtained -the hedonic perception of consumers changes significantly- (Hough et al., 2002).For all the above, the aims of this research were: a) to estimate the sensory shelf-life of a cereal bar, b) to obtain more information on the characteristics of the product throughout cereal bar shelf-life by applying the CATA test, and c) to study the effect of the discarded terms on the analysis and the results. This work will allow us to know the benefits of applying CATA to study the shelf-life of a product, and identify whether it is convenient to modify the usual data analysis as for the discarded terms.