Sensory Evaluation: The Key to Winning Consumer Loyalty in CPG

What’s your favorite sensory experience of food? If you live in America, you might not know how to answer that.

But if you live in France, you’ll likely provide a confident, nuanced answer. Food is central to French cultural identity, with their gastronomic meal earning a spot on UNESCO’s heritage list in 2010.

This French-level dedication to food mirrors the work of food scientists, who use sensory evaluation to analyze every detail of a product—taste, texture, aroma, and even packaging—to craft irresistible experiences that captivate consumers.

In this article, we'll take a deeper look into how sensory evaluation—the process of learning what makes food and products taste, smell, and feel amazing—helps brands create products we genuinely want to buy and enjoy using.

What is sensory evaluation?

Sensory evaluation is the science of measuring and analyzing how people perceive flavors, textures, and other qualities to ensure consistency and create irresistible products.

It can be split into two categories: quality assurance and product development. 

Quality assurance is critical for any mass produced good, and food is no exception. Brands and manufacturers need to ensure that every consumer is receiving a consistent and reliable product experience, every time they buy the product.

Product development requires sensory evaluation to understand what characteristics will make a product fly off shelves (versus lose to the competition). Food scientists in product development need data to understand the flavors and textures most appealing to today’s consumers.

What can sensory evaluations tell you about your product?

The whole point of sensory testing in the CPG vertical is to achieve appeal, quality control, and market viability. In simple terms, your new product should:

• Taste, smell, and sound as good as possible.
• Provide an experience that is consistent with each usage, by every tester.
• Offers something different from your category competitors by meeting an unmet need and taking advantage of category white space.
• Lives up to the claims you make on the package or in your advertising.
• Meets trending demand for factors such as flavor, texture, and sweetness

If you’re updating your product, it should provide an experience your loyal consumers love just as much as the previous version. Formula updates should be undetectable and can be evaluated through alienation testing.

What’s the best way to conduct an accurate sensory evaluation?

Sensory evaluation methods vary depending on the product and the goals of the evaluation. Here's a breakdown of the best approach for different industries.

Industries Best Suited for Professional Sensory Evaluators

Specialty categories often require an expert tester for sensory evaluation. These professionals are “palate-trained” to detect even small variations in taste, texture, flavor, aroma, and more. 

Examples include:

• Wine. Sommeliers play a critical role in evaluating both quality assurance and product development, ensuring the right notes of black currant, mint, and cedar are achieved.
• Specialty foods and beverages. Products like craft coffee, premium chocolate, or aged cheese often require professional evaluators to meet exacting sensory standards.
  
  

Industries That Benefit Most from In-Home Testers

For most categories, everyday consumers provide the most valuable feedback for product development. Examples include:

• Most food and beverage products. Testing items like snacks, beverages, or frozen meals benefits from insights directly from the target consumer.
• Household goods. Products such as cleaning supplies or air fresheners need to be evaluated in the context of everyday life.
• Personal care products. Items like shampoo, toothpaste, or skincare are best tested by consumers in their daily routines to evaluate real-world effectiveness and appeal.
• Pet products. Pet food, treats, or litter require feedback from pet owners who use them in their regular home environments.
• Health and wellness products. Nutritional bars, supplements, or protein shakes should be tested by consumers in their normal routines to gauge flavor, convenience, and adherence to health claims.
• Baby products. Items like baby food, formula, or wipes require real-life usage feedback from parents to assess effectiveness, convenience, and appeal to infants.

The best way to conduct sensory evaluations for everyday products is through in-home usage testing. IHUT reflects real-world usage and helps brands understand how their products perform in typical, organic environments. 

As Lauren Rappaport, Highlight’s Director of Sensory, explains in this sensory testing interview: “The most crucial component of consumer testing is bringing in the authentic voice of the customer. There is no better way to predict how people are going to react to a product in market.”

Learn how to choose the right testers for your sensory evaluation

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How do you know when your product hits the mark?

Everyone wants to develop a product that tastes, feels, and smells good. But what does that even mean?

For professional sensory evaluation, there are certain standards a product must meet. Let’s return to the example of the wine: simply using cabernet sauvignon grapes is not enough. You need a professional sensory evaluation to make sure you are hitting the right notes of black currant, mint, and cedar.  

For everyday consumer sensory evaluation, measuring “good” is very different–but just as important. Research-grade methodology and rigorous data collection is important to ensure you are able to identify the holy grail of “good” before going to market.

How brands measure “good” in consumer sensory evaluation

It’s one thing to say that you should conduct sensory evaluation with laypeople who reflect your consumer demographic. It’s another to actually harness the research expertise needed to compose these kinds of surveys. Survey methodology is a crucial practice area, and any brand embarking on sensory evaluation should work with trained professionals to ensure they are following best practices.

Methodologies for consumer sensory evaluation include:

JAR scales: JAR, or “just about right” questions use a number scale (usually 1 to 5) to ask product testers about the intensity of a sensorial property like sweetness or crunchiness. The “just about right” name comes from the fact that product developers are looking for that Goldilocks “sweet spot” where a product is neither “too much” or “too little.”

Hedonic scaling is not so different from JAR scales in the sense that it is also often used with a 1 to 5 scale (for example, from “Dislike Extremely” to “Like Extremely”) to ask product testers how they feel about either the overall product or a specific sensory characteristic of the product such as flavor or texture. 

Preference rankings are exactly what they sound like, and are employed in sequential monadic testing (also called comparison testing) to assess which prototypes or formulations consumers like the most (and the least). 

Choice tests are similar but instead of requesting a ranking of the testers favorite to least favorite, testers may be asked to simply pick their favorite. These kinds of questions are often accompanied by purchase intent questions about their likelihood to purchase such a product.

3 Myths of Sensory Evaluation

Sensory science and its methods for sensory evaluation has been around a long time, but like any scientific field, it is constantly evolving. We recommend keeping up with an organization like the Society of Sensory Professionals (SSP) in order to stay updated on the latest innovations in the field. 

As the CPG product innovation world grows, more and more professionals need access to the principles of sensory science–but that might mean encountering some outdated ideas or misinformation. Here are some of the most common misconceptions we at Highlight see:

Myth 1: “I should wait until just before the final product cycle to conduct sensory evaluation.” 

We can’t emphasize this enough: While a stage-gate approach to product development worked when innovation cycles lasted 12 months or more, that is not the way modern brands are developing and testing products.

Today, innovation cycles are a half or even a quarter of the length they used to be. More and more brands are bringing products to market in mere months. They’re able to move so quickly by retiring the stage-gate strategy and turning to agile iteration. 

Learn more about Clorox and agile product innovation for CPG brands

An agile innovation approach unlocks previously impossible speed to market, and implements product testing methodology like sensory evaluation early and often to enable continuous learning. 

Myth 2:  “I must control for environmental conditions.”

Not exactly. In professional sensory evaluation in lab setting, there may be circumstances where controlling environmental factors matters. In consumer sensory evaluation, there may be considerations like seasonality–for instance, do you really want to test your new popsicle with consumers in New England in January?

But overall, the goal is in fact NOT to control the environment in which your consumers will conduct their sensory evaluation. There’s a lot you can’t predict about how consumers will use your product, and that’s okay. Maybe you developed the product intending it for use as a breakfast food, only to find that consumers are enjoying it as a dessert. Maybe you developed a product for children, only to discover the parents really love the flavor. Be open to uncovering these kinds of insights and you may reveal hidden opportunities for expanding your target market or tailoring your marketing communications.

Note that this does not apply to the condition of your actual product–be sure to work with a shipping and logistics partner that can ensure your product arrives to sensory testers at the intended fidelity–whether that means frozen, refrigerated or something else.

Myth 3: “Sensory evaluation is just for food and beverage products.”

A sensory evaluation is necessary for a whole host of CPG products outside of food and beverage. For example, in preparation for a new product launch, one national cat litter brand used Highlight to assess reactions to a new lavender fragrance.

Using Highlight’s best practices guidance, the cat litter brand designed a study robust enough to gather the comprehensive feedback they needed. Verbatims were captured at the point of pouring the cat litter, and then testers completed a survey at the end of a week-long trial. Ten respondents submitted video feedback, and five respondents participated in 45-minute long online in-depth interviews (IDI) to share every detail of their product experience.

At the end of their research, this cat litter brand had:

• The live data from their Highlight dashboards
• A deeper understanding of consumer perceptions thanks to verbatims, video, and IDI
• Data on key drivers of interest and product fit among key consumer demographics
  
  

A cost-effective approach to sensory evaluation

In professional sensory testing, or for massive brands with the budget, their product testing may focus completely on sensory evaluation.

For most brands looking to do more with less in today’s competitive landscape, that’s not the case. Cost efficacy is a top priority, which is why many brands choose to pair their sensory evaluation with other kinds of product testing to squeeze as much data and insights from a research project as possible.

For example, your Research & Development team may be in need of sensory insights, but you know that not so far down the line, your marketing team is going to need insights on the best packaging design and on-pack claims, what language is best resonating with your target demographic, and a deeper understanding of what really matters most to your target consumer. 

By weaving sensory and consumer insight testing together, brands can streamline their research and empower every team that could benefit from data-driven decision-making.

Learn how to bridge sensory & insights research 

to cut innovation cycles

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The real cost of skipping sensory evaluation

At the end of the day, conducting proper sensory evaluation to derive high-quality insights is all about the business impact you can make when your product development decisions are fully data-driven.

And yet, many businesses still skip this critical step in product development, or cut corners in an effort to save time and money. 

But as the old saying goes, being cheap is expensive. When companies proceed without consumer data, they go to market blindly and risk the loss of millions of dollars, months of development, and seeing millions of units end up in landfills.

Conducting sensory evaluation is the most effective way a CPG company can mitigate this risk–and ideally go on to earn millions of new consumers and dollars in revenue with a product people love. 

Learn more about Highlight’s tech-enabled sensory evaluation