Which value can be granted to sensory profiles given by consumers? Methodology and results

The introduction of sensory descriptive questions in consumer studies is often criticized. From a data set, provided for the 5th sensometrics meeting, we show that sensory profiles obtained from consumers can have two essential qualities: consensus and reproducibility. This implies that we cannot (a priori) forbid the use of sensory profiles given by consumers. To show this, we use analyses of variance and multiple factor analysis; these methods are useful to obtain a visualization of the data from several panels.