New tasters to ensure quality

The value of “tasters” could perhaps be dismissed, as taste is, to a certain extent, “a matter of taste” and thus subjective.

This is not the whole truth, however. Human senses do have the ability to decode quality in many contexts, especially when it comes to food.

The senses of taste and smell evolved precisely to allow us to assess the quality of and recognise what we eat.

When the right guidance and systematics are applied, these innate abilities can be effective tools to, for example, detect changes in the state of food.

Intern with a special interest

For a food company like Procudan, it is an obvious choice to use our employees' senses.

That is why we have set up a panel of tasters to allow us to assess taste and quality in connection with trials towards the further development of our ProCera cheese wax and in relation to other foods, such as the various categories of dried fruit and nuts that we store in our warehouse.

Andreas Kristensen was a big help when it came to setting up our panel of tasters.

Andreas is studying food technology and its application at Aarhus Business Academy and has been an intern at Procudan for the last six months where he has worked in Quality and our lab.

The task of setting up a panel of tasters was already defined for Andreas before he started.

- Our senses are one of the main things that interest me, so I thought this was an incredibly exciting task, to which I was well suited. I have also undergone similar training as part of a panel of tasters as part of my course of study, he says.

Had to train his colleagues

From the very outset, Andreas was tasked with finding out what it takes to train an in-house panel of tasters and to then train any colleagues who were interested in joining the panel.

- Being responsible for test design and training is a big task. But there was plenty of support and interest from my colleagues in the many different departments, he explains.

Now that his colleagues have completed their training, our panel of tasters can now play an integrated role towards improving our food safety.

Andreas Kristensen will, however, be returning to his studies at the start of the Spring semester.