Q. What do you mean by Descriptors?

Descriptors are selected terms used to describe the sensory attributes of products and vary from one product to the other. The chosen descriptors should be non redundant with other terms and should have no overlap with other terms used. Descriptors should have certain desirable characteristics of being discriminating, representative of the product quality, precise and reliable, unambiguous and should easily relate to consumer acceptance or rejection.

Descriptive analysis technique involves judging a product on the basis of its appearance, texture, taste, flavour and mouthfeel. It is a very helpful technique as the key words used are made to describe the product for a producible and consistent analysis.

Although this technique involves both quantitative and qualitative analysis of food by using various methods as flavour profile technique/method, texture profile technique and so on. However, these type of descriptive analysis would require trained panelists for the purpose of evaluation. Thus, for our learning we would conduct a qualitative descriptive analysis of a product. For example, a slice of white bread in our activity 2 to understand the concept of food analysis.