ELECTRONIC NOSE AND SENSORY ANALYSIS - COMPARISON OF PERFORMANCES IN SELECTED CASES

Sensorial analysis based on the utilisation of human senses, is one of the most important and straightforward investigation methods in food analysis. It provides a unique information about the 'food-man interac tion'. Nevertheless, human senses, when considered as instruments, sho w several problems of reproducibility, stability and difficulties of e xpression, making it very hard to compare results between different pa nels. The electronic nose has been proven to be sufficiently accurate as an artificial approximation of the human olfaction apparatus when a pplied to well defined problems in food analysis. In this paper result s obtained for tomato pastes and milk analysis, comparing a panel of t asters and an electronic nose will be presented and discussed. (C) 199 8 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.