Suitability of Free Choice Profiling for assessment of orange-based carbonated soft-drinks

A Free Choice Profiling test was carried out to find out whether assessors with a basic sensory knowledge are able to characterise flavour and odour of orange-based lemonades. The experiment was run with eight different samples of orange-based soft drinks in four replicates. Generalized Procrustes Analysis combined with Principal Component Analysis were used to analyse and plot the data. The analysis of the four separate replicates showed, that the assessors were not able to reproduce their description of the sensory characteristics suitably, there were relatively large differences between the assessments of the same products by the same assessors in the different replicates. Even for this data, however, the permutation test showed a highly significant group average configuration. This was mainly due to differences between the replicates. But a large residual variance remained. Only about 30% of the variability could be explained by the group average configuration, and only about 12% of the total variance could be explained by the first two dimensions of it. When the four assessments of each product were averaged to stabilize the data, 60% of the total variance could be explained by the group average configuration and the first two dimensions of it could explain 30% of the total variability. Therefore, at least a coarse interpretation of the consensus space could be made. Our general finding was that profiling of orange-based lemonades by nearly untrained assessors appears to be useful but should be considered with some reserve. It seems that the differences between the products were too subtle for a reproducible profiling by these methods. However, some interpretable results on the structure of the products and on the variables could be gained. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.