Cara Technology Launches AROXA Flavor Standards For Taste Panel Training
Cara Technology is launching a new range of taste panel training products for the water, soft drinks, cider, and wine industries. A range of more than 250 individual reference flavour standards will be delivered direct to the market under the AROXA brand name. This will provide quality assurance professionals and taste panel leaders in these industries with the tools they need to develop and maintain skilled professional taste panels for product testing, descriptive profiling and product development.
Cara Technology is the company behind the world's first reference flavour standards, launched 15 years ago and used to develop the skills of more than 15,000 professional tasters throughout the global brewing industry. Now, for the first time, Cara has created reference flavour standards specifically for other drinks - cider, wine, water and soft drinks. These standards can be used in a range of important ways such as training tasters, validating assessor performance, and conducting sensory quality assurance tests on products prior to release to the market.
The flavour standards comprise food-grade materials which are safe to smell and taste. They are treated to remove sensory impurities before being nano-encapsulated to give them a long shelf-life. They are presented in unit-dosed gelatine capsules, providing sufficient material to generate precise, tried and tested, concentrations of flavour in each litre of product. Each flavour standard is supplied with an information sheet which gives details concerning the assessment of the flavour note, its flavour threshold, the distribution of threshold values among assessors, the origins of the flavour and its importance to the product.
Although each product can be purchased individually, the AROXA flavours can also be purchased as kits representing different categories, such as off-flavours and taints.
Commenting on the new range, Dr Bill Simpson, the leading brewing technologist who founded Cara Technology in 1995, said: "In such an innovation-led market it makes sense for us to use our extensive experience and expertise in flavour reference standards to create products to benefit the soft drinks, water, wine, and cider industries. Our products have had a transformative effect on the brewing industry. The skills of professional beer tasters throughout the globe are today demonstrably excellent. This situation has been made possible by the availability of training tools and the commitment of brewing companies to eliminate subjectivity from their tasting activities."
Bill Simpson adds: "We have also developed a range of multi-purpose flavour standards which can be used virtually anywhere – in products as diverse as cheese, pasta, soya milk, gravy granules, tomato ketchup, cook-in sauces, rum, vodka and whisky. We're aiming to bring the advantages of objective sensory assessment and rigorous training programmes to a diversity of food and drinks industries."
Customers have direct access to extensive physical, chemical, microbiological and sensory analysis data which is generated for each batch of flavours. This means that sensory analysts can know precisely how much flavour material is present in each batch of capsules. From a compliance perspective users can be sure of accessing the most current information relating to the flavour materials, reinforcing confidence in the safety of the samples presented to tasters.
The new AROXA range of flavour standards is available from 24th October 2011 from www.aroxa.com.
SOURCE: Cara Technology