Sensory Evaluation Practices

Herbert Stone, Ph.D. is Senior Advisor & Co-Founder of Tragon Corporation where he served as President from 1974-2008. A former Director of Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI) Food & Agricultural Sciences Department, Dr. Stone was President of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) from 2004-2005. With a Ph.D. from U.C. Davis, he has lectured worldwide, is the author of over 150 publications, and holds six patents. Dr. Stone founded Tragon® in 1974 with Joel L. Sidel. Dr. Stone serves as the Scientific Editor for the Sensory and Quality Section of the Journal of Food Science. He also serves on the Univ. of Massachusetts and UC Davis advisory boards and also serves as Adjunct Professor, Fuzhou University and Visiting Professor, Southern Yangtze University. He chairs the Sensory Science Scholarship Fund. He is the 2010 recipient of the ASTM E18 Peryam Award for contributions to the science of sensory evaluation. In 1974, Stone and Sidel founded the Tragon Corporation, an important sensory consulting and testing company offering full-service consumer goods research. As a pioneering company in the field of sensory evaluation, Tragon has been able to offer unparalleled capabilities to its customers through the Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) sensory method, a market evaluation system developed by Stone and Sidel.Cumulatively, the authors have over half a century experience in the field of sensory evaluation. In addition to founding the Tragon Corporation, the authors have conducted domestic and international workshops; designed, analyzed, and reported on over 10,000 sensory tests; and have been sensory consultants to the senior management of most major food and consumer products companies.

Organization and operation of a sensory evaluation program; measurement; test strategy and the design of experiments; discrimination testing; descriptive analysis; acceptance testing; special problems