ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on methods that are being used for the evaluation of food texture. It describes some of the approaches and techniques of sensory texture analysis used at Natick Research, Development, and Engineering Center (NRDEC) by using several examples as vehicles for presentation. Although the methods used at NRDEC for qualitative description of texture are essentially the same as the traditional profiling methods, the methods used for quantitative description may differ from those used by other texture profile panels in industry. The need to use alternative scaling methods is due to the fact that the scaling technique specified in the original General Foods Texture Profile Method is, at best, an ordinal scale. Since trends in sensory analysis are toward the more frequent use of ratio-scaling techniques such as magnitude estimation, one can rightfully ask how the data obtained via these methods compare with the data obtained via the interval-scaling techniques such as category scales.
