Relating the sensory sensation 'creamy mouthfeel' in custards to rheological measurements

Characteristics of food products are commonly assessed in series of sensory studies to gain insight which can be used, for instance, for product development. Sensory studies are very time-consuming and susceptible to large sources of variation. Assessing information about (new) products by means of instrumental measurements would be very beneficial for numerous reasons, including repeatability, reproducibility and, most of all, the fact that instruments do not suffer from fatigue or adaptation. Measurements simulating sensory assessment of product properties can be performed at different stages of consumption and on different types of sensory attributes. In this study the relation between rheological parameters and creamy mouthfeel was investigated. The goal was to discover whether a model using a limited mechanical characterization, namely parameters describing bulk rheological behaviour, would suffice to describe the sensory attribute creamy mouthfeel , also called creaminess. The two main reasons for performing this study were (i) to investigate the possibility of using rheological measurements for high-throughput screening of newly developed custard products without the need for involving sensory panels already at an early stage of product development and (ii) to gain knowledge about the correlation between rheological measurements and the multidimensional attribute creamy mouthfeel. The resulting model shows that prediction of creamy mouthfeel by means of rheological measurements is possible only to a certain extent (Q2cv=0,48). Reasons that can be mentioned for deviations between measured creaminess and modelled creaminess are (i) variation in measured creamy mouthfeel scores (variation in y-variable) and (ii) lack of description of surface properties of the food product by the rheological measurements used here. The results show that instrumental measurements are complementary to sensory analysis and can greatly facilitate the task for the practitioner at an early stage of product development, making high-throughput screening of novel products feasible