Barbara Rainey Consulting

Barbara Rainey Consulting can come on-site on a monthly or bi-monthly schedule (typically 3-5 consecutive days) and conduct your sensory testing using your employees or a non-employee community panel.  Affective testing, discrimination testing and descriptive testing can be conducted. 

How does this program work?

We work with your project requestors (sensory test requests may come from R&D, operations or marketing) to design the appropriate sensory evaluation tests. We then come on-site and conduct the tests, analyze the data and submit the written reports back to the project requestors.  

What do you need to provide?

Employees who will participate on the sensory panels. 

For affective tests, employees are not trained and can participate on a test if they like the product category.  Employees may be recruited from any area within your company.  If you do not have a large enough employee base, you may need to develop a database of consumers from the community who would come on-site to participate on the sensory panel.

For discrimination tests, employees are screened for discrimination skill but are not trained.

For descriptive tests, employees are screened and trained before becoming a descriptive panelist.

An area for the sensory testing and a sample preparation area.

These areas should be adjacent to each other if possible.  The sensory testing area should be a room that is odor-free, with adequate lighting and easily accessible by the employees.  A large conference room may be used.  The sample preparation area must have appropriate storage and preparation equipment and should not be the employee break area.

A contact person for the sensory testing program.

This individual will be responsible for scheduling testing with us and the project requestors, notifying employees of the sensory test schedule and making sure test products are at the testing site.