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Sensory analysis applied to honey: state of the art

2004; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 35; Issue: Suppl. 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1051/apido

1297-9678

Maria Lucia Piana, Livia Persano Oddo, Antonio Bentabol, Étienne Bruneau, Stefan Bogdanov, Christine Guyot Declerck,

Phytochemicals and Antioxidant Activities

Sensory analysis is the examination of a product through the evaluation of the attributes perceptible by the five sense organs (organoleptic attributes), such as colour, odour, taste, touch, texture and noise. Used in many fields, sensory analysis allows to establish the organoleptic profile of diverse products (foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, household products), and can be useful in knowing how they are perceived by the consumer. Until the 1960s, sensory analysis techniques basically relied on the personal experience of expert assessors. This technique was simple and low cost, but it lacked the essential requisite of reproducibility in order to be considered a fully fledged analytical method. In the second half of the twentieth century, new and improved sensory evaluation methods were developed using panels of assessors, well defined and controlled experimental protocols and statistical techniques for processing the results (Pangborn, 1964; Stone and Sidel, 1985; ISO 6658, 1985; SSHA and ISHA, 1990; Meilgaard et al., 1991). The advantage of these methods over traditional ones is that the results are reproducible, but the complexity and high costs limit their use to the field of research and development of new products, rather than the routine use in the framework of monitoring processes and quality control. In the case of honey, sensory analysis was first used in France with traditional techniques, by the Gonnet team (Gonnet and Vache, 1979, 1985, 1992, 1998). In Italy, Gonnet’s ideas were taken up with particular enthusiasm; much effort was dedicated to training activities and an Italian Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey was founded, which established a standard traditional methodology including harmonized terminology, evaluation forms, tasting methods, methods for training and selecting assessors and sensory descriptions of the principal Italian unifloral honeys (Persano Oddo et al., 1995, 2000; Istituto Nazionale di Apicoltura, 1999). Similarly, Gonnet’s legacy was also taken up and developed in other European countries (such as