Humans Now Used as Taste-Testers for Pet Food

In a recent Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition paper, Dr. Pickering explains the potential value of having people act as taste testers to rate cat foods. For example, he believes it might enable manufacturers to understand why a cat favors certain foods.

While manufacturers conduct trials to see what felines prefer, it's difficult to know exactly which flavors or textures the cats are responding to, he explains. "Cats aren't very good at vocalizing what they like or don't like about cat foods," said Dr. Pickering, who conducted the study in Australia before coming to Brock University. "The idea was that humans can quite clearly verbalize what it is. Humans can also rate the intensity of different characteristics in a particular food or beverage."

Dr. Pickering says the value of his recent work could lie in taking the results of the human testing and comparing them to results of cat testing on the same products. It might offer a shortcut for researchers, he says. Testers rated the foods on 18 flavor attributes, including tuna, prawn, chicken, caramel, cereal, soy, burnt flavors, bitter and offaly. They also evaluated textures, such as grittiness and chewiness.

Read more . . . Taste that innovates - human taste-testers testing cat food