Checking quality of sensory data via an agreement-based approach

Sensory evaluations are adopted in many fields for measuring and comparing sensory properties of products and improving their quality. The selection of panelists able to provide precise evaluations is a crucial issue to perform reliable sensory analysis. An agreement based approach is here suggested in order to assess the quality of sensory data in terms of both panelist repeatability and panel reproducibility. The approach has been applied to two case studies involving untrained sensory panelists and trained teaching quality assessors, respectively. The results of the case studies show that although reproducibility can be assumed moderate for both groups of raters, repeatability is generally higher for the group of trained raters