Scelta Mushrooms is all about mushrooms: from fresh-frozen and preserved varieties to innovative applications such as fat replacements and umami enhancers. Eighteen employees of the Venlo-based company are undergoing training through Brightlands NovaBite and will soon start as taste experts.
According to Sophie Tullemans, sensory expert at Brightlands NovaBite, anyone can learn to taste. 'We train people to taste at an equal level, but there are three basic prerequisites: you must be able to smell, taste well and be non-colour-blind, as sometimes you also have to judge a product by colour. This we check beforehand with a simple test. As you pass those, you can become a probe. The best is when you have a broad expert panel, from the product developer to the HR person.'
'A trained panel contributes to product quality, brand identity and innovation. At the same time, you save costs by being less dependent on external panels'
Own taste panel
Brightlands NovaBite helps companies set up an internal taste panel to assess taste, flavour and product quality. The training courses focus on developing employees' tasting skills and expertise so that they can assess products more accurately and consistently according to their company's standards.
More and more companies are choosing to set up their own taste panel. 'With an internal taste panel will give you good insight into your products as a company. This allows you to better understand and communicate unique characteristics and differences to customers,' Sophie says. 'A trained panel contributes to product quality, brand identity and innovation. At the same time, you save costs by relying less on external panels.'
Rachel Eikelboom supervises the 18 participants at Scelta Mushrooms and is herself trained as panel leader of the in-house taste panel. Tasting is her daily work. As Technical Sales & Application Advisor, she can often be found in the kitchen testing and improving products. 'For me, how you taste products is obvious, but not for many colleagues. But that is precisely an advantage: by involving different employees, you taste more objectively.'
But commitment and professionalism are also important reasons to start working with your own taste panel, according to Rachel. 'Because you have to test products regularly as an employee, you get more affinity with the products we develop here and we can also advise our customers better with reliable results. A Another additional advantage of having our own taste panel is that we can do 'in house' testing faster. We get a lot of customer queries and we can address them immediately with our own panel. That saves time and money.'
Taste mapping
The taste panel helps not only with existing products, ingredients and applications, but also with new innovations. 'We have recently developed a fat substitute based on white Dutch mushrooms. Die should ensure the right texture, juiciness and tenderness in meat substitutes,' Rachel explains. 'With our panel, we can test this before the product reaches the market.'
Taste lets you enjoy food, but it is also a complex interplay of chemical reactions and sensory perception. 'Anyone can tell if something tastes good, but trained panellists can name what makes a product taste good,' says Sophie. 'That is something that even the most modern measuring equipment can hardly determine.'
According to Sophie, to get the most unambiguous assessment of a product, it is important that the participants in a taste panel have the same interpretation of how salty, bitter or sweet something is. 'If you eat salt-free, for example, you will experience a product differently from someone who uses a lot of salt. When you are untrained, this certainly plays a role. But with this training, you make sure that the interpretation is the same and all experts judge the taste aspects from the same basis, the same taste starting point.'
Own vocabulary
After the first training sessions, Rachel and her colleagues are enthusiastic. 'We learn to describe tastes and textures objectively. Me assume that after the 10 training sessions, we will all be experts in describing mushroom flavour and together we can develop our own vocabulary for our mushroom products. That helps us not only internally, but also in our communication with customers.'
Sophie stresses that a taste panel needs continuous practice. 'It is like learning a language: you have to keep training to stay sharp. Tasting weekly keeps the panel on its toes and keeps Scelta Mushrooms working on flavour improvement and innovation.'
