Statistics for Sensory and Consumer Science

Book Preface

Sensory and consumer studies play an important role in food science and industry. They are both crucial for understanding the relation between food properties on one side and human liking and buying behaviour on the other. These studies produce large amounts of data and without proper data analysis techniques it is impossible to understand the data fully and to draw the best possible conclusions.

This book aims at presenting a comprehensive overview of the most important and frequently used statistical methods for handling data from both trained sensory panels and consumer studies of food. A major target group for this book is food scientists and food engineers working in research and industry. Another important target group is food science students at master and PhD level at universities and colleges. Applied statisticians with special interests in food science will also find important material in the book. The goal is to present the reader with enough material to make him/her able to use the most important methods and to interpret the results safely.

The book is organised in two main parts, Part I has a quite different focus to Part II. Part I has a problem oriented focus and presents a number of typical and important situations in which statistical methods are needed. Part II has a method oriented perspective and all the methods discussed in Part I are described more thoroughly here. There is a strong link between Part 1 and Part II through extensive cross referencing. The structure of the book is also presented in Figure 1.1.

The book will have focus on relationships between methods and techniques and on considering all of them as special cases of more general statistical methodologies. In this way we will avoid, as far as possible, using “local dialect” for each of the themes discussed. Conjoint analysis is an example of an area which has developed into a separate discipline with a particular terminology and culture. In our approach conjoint analysis will be considered and presented as an example of an intelligent use of experimental design and analysis of variance which are both classical disciplines in statistics. It will be assumed that the reader has a basic knowledge of statistics and also the most important data collection methods within sensory and consumer science. For some of the more advanced parts of Part II, an elementary knowledge of matrix algebra will make reading easier.