General Mills

Product Evaluation

Our procedures, equipment, and people enable us to track the quality of finished products over time as well as compare them to a gold standard. Product Evaluation involves analytical methods in addition to sensory methods and Medallion is well versed in both to help you understand more about your product.

Why Trust the Minds of Medallion?

Medallion’s scientists have years of experience in launching new and reformulated products as well as monitoring changes through a product’s lifecycle. Our vast network of food industry experts as well as our state of the art equipment can help you maximize your product’s performance. Medallion also offers a full-service analytical sensory evaluation department to provide fast, actionable guidance in developing, improving, or maintaining the sensory quality of food and beverage products.

Product Performance

Complete product performance evaluation can be used to monitor ingredient effectiveness.  Product performance evaluations are a combination of analytical and sensory data.  Any of the product performance offerings can be done for:

  • New Product or Reformulation, New Plant, Co-Packer or New Equipment Start-up
  • Competitive Surveillance Reviews or Market Surveys
  • Trouble Shooting or Customer Complaints

Sensory Evaluation

Sensory evaluation is a very important tool for product development and consumer product management.  More and more food manufacturers are recognizing the value of using sensory to measure product acceptability, differences, improvements, and opportunities.

  • Discrimination testing will determine IF two products are detectably different or IF a product has changed. Uses for discrimination testing include:
    • Ingredient substitution or cost savings
    • Legal claims support
    • Comparison of production facilities or runs
    • Storage stability
  • Descriptive testing is used to describe and quantify sensory differences between samples. Methods range from broad Difference from Control measurements to comprehensive flavor and texture profiling using the Sensory Spectrum Method®. Uses for descriptive testing include:
    • Prototype screening (documenting flavor and texture)
    • Understanding the effects of different processes, ingredients, and/or packaging
    • Interpreting consumer responses to products
    • Describing/monitoring competitive products or reverse engineering products
    • On-going detailed quality monitoring for production or incoming raw materials
  • DFC – Difference from Control testing is used to determine if there is a difference between one or more test samples and a control.  The size of the difference is also measured with this method.