AMSA has announced that Ms. Kristen Dale, Dr. Koushik Adhikari, and Ms. Elizabeth Suter as the featured speakers in the symposium entitled “Sensory and Consumer Testing Methods” on Tuesday, August 17, 2021, during the 74th AMSA Reciprocal Meat Conference (RMC) at the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino in Reno, Nevada, USA. This session is funded by The Beef Checkoff. 

Kristen Dale, Vice President of Client Partnerships at InsightsNow, Inc., will kick off this session with a presentation titled “Applying Consumer-Centric Research Design in Today’s World.” Connecting with your consumer often and quickly is rule #1 for effective and inspired product development. In these times of COVID, this has become more challenging. Ms. Dale will present case studies utilizing on-demand solutions from community-based HUTs to qualitative boards to COVID behavioral and product trackers which continue the flow of research without sacrificing on design while maximizing budgets. Utilizing these consumer-centric approaches will help you innovate quickly leveraging modern rapid iterative research methods ensuring your products success.

University of Georgia Professor of Food Science and Technology, Dr. Koushik Adhikari, will continue with a presentation reviewing “Consumer Acceptability of Beef Steaks from Different USDA Quality Grades.” This study explored the consumer preferences and acceptability for the three quality grades of steaks – Upper Choice (UC), Lower Choice (LC), and Select (SE) with 116 consumers in Griffin, GA. Majority of the consumers (85/116) preferred the UC steak over the LC and SE steaks. The LC and SE steaks had similar palatability in this group of consumers. The results from this part of the study will be added to the parent to achieve the overarching goal of predicting desirable beef flavor using metabolomics.

Ms. Elizabeth Suter, Senior Sensory Scientist for Tyson Foods, Inc., will round out this session with a talk titled “Understanding What Drives Consumer Acceptance: Linking Descriptive Analysis and Consumer Data through Multivariate Analysis.” During this presentation Ms. Suter will use a case study to lead attendees through the generation of both sensory descriptive analysis and consumer acceptance data.   She will wrap up her session with a hands-on activity to give attendees the opportunity to generate their own data through a short sample tasting, and then enable them to use multivariate analysis to draw their own conclusions about what sensory attributes drive the groups’ liking.

The AMSA 74th RMC will be held August 15-18, 2021, at the Grand Sierra Resort in a hybrid format. 

AMSA is an organization recognized for its unmatched competence and commitment to attracting and developing meat industry leaders and providing science-based meat research and information. For more information, please visit www.meatscience.org/rmc or contact Deidrea Mabry 1-800-517-AMSA ext. 12. 

Source: AMSA