Temporal ranking for the characterization and better discrimination of protein beverages with different sweeteners
This study proposes the application of ranking to temporal product evaluation to differentiate attribute dominances over time. The ability of the proposed method to discriminate sensory differences was compared to temporal check-all-that-apply (TCATA), a discriminating temporal method for capturing the temporal profile of food and beverage products.
Ready-to-mix (RTM) protein beverages were formulated with vanilla flavor, whey protein isolate (25 g protein per 355mL serving), and iso-sweet concentrations of sucrose, fructose, sucralose, stevia, or monk fruit. A trained sensory panel (n=10) completed TCATA and temporal ranking (TR) exercises using an iPad interface (Compusense Cloud). Attributes evaluated for both TCATA and TR were sweet aromatic, cardboard, sweet taste, bitter taste, metallic, and astringency. Evaluation time for the temporal exercises was 193 s total—15 s of in-mouth evaluation and 178 s of aftertaste evaluation. Evaluations were performed in triplicate for each method (6 total sessions) in a balanced randomized design. To evaluate the TR and TCATA methods, each test sample was compared with the sucrose control. Overall, TR exhibited greater ability to differentiate the sensations elicited by protein beverage formulations than TCATA, although both methods consistently detected similar differences. The most notable difference between the two methods was that TCATA did not detect significant differences between sucralose and sucrose protein beverages whereas TR results indicate that sweet taste and metallic mouthfeel were more dominant in the sucralose beverage, whereas sweet aromatic was more dominant in the sucrose control. In summary, TR was more sensitive in detecting sensory differences over time than TCATA. Furthermore, using TR may enhance our ability to determine how different sweeteners or ingredients affects a product’s flavor profile, and thus provide better guidance for the development and formulation of foods. Further application of findings and methodologies from this study may help guide development and formulation of foods.
Keefer, H.M., Harwood, H.S., Castura, J.C., Drake, M.A. (2020). Temporal ranking for the characterization and better
discrimination of protein beverages with different sweeteners. 9th European Conference on Sensory and Consumer Research, 13-16 December. Online. (Poster).