104 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS The food technologist is also striving to satisfy the customer. Al- though the products he deals with may seem quite different from cosmetics they undoubtedly appeal to many of the same senses. The importance of odor to the taste of a food product is easily demonstrated if you have ever eaten an apple or an onion or have drunk a cup of coffee while holding your nose firmly closed. A brief experiment of this kind will quickly show that an extremely important part of taste depends on the aromatic char- acter of the food. The food technologist hopes that his customers, as well as those of his cosmetologist brothers, also look better and feel better as a result of his efforts. - Both cosmetic and food industries are becoming more and more tech- nical in their methods of production and in their research to improve old products and develop new products. We use up-to-date quality con- trol methods we measure ingredient purity by refined analytical means we set up rigid specifications for both raw materials and finished products. We utilize more and more the scientific disciplines of Chemistry, Physics, Biochemistry, Mathematics, and the like. We come to know more and more about how our processes work. We become almost infallible in our ability to reproduce a given product day after day and year after year. Many industries are realizing that we must not stop with guaranteeing reproducibility and uniformity of our products. Obviously there is very little profit in possessing a vast amount of technical know-how about a product unless the customer likes and wants that product. Measuring and evaluating consumer acceptance is becoming increasingly important in a highly competitive field. Frequently, the research man receives consumer guidance from the people in his company whose job it is to sell the product. That is, management describes the type of product it wants, it prescribes the purpose for which it is to be used, and sometimes specifies its physical properties. The technical man then develops a reasonable facsimile and submits samples to management. He may also offer real contributions of his own in the form of factors which he believes will add to the desirability of the prod- uct and may be able to present several versions of the original product. After this first attempt to produce a satisfactory product the research man may be redirected. In the food field, for instance, a cereal may be consid- ered too crisp or too tough, too dark or too light, too fragile or too hard, too fiavorful or too bland, to contain too much sweetness or too little. In the food industry the research man uses his best judgment on all these factors all through the process of his work. He relies not only on his own judgment but may frequently use taste panels to help him evaluate and describe the qualities of his experimental products. Management, however, must necessarily have the last word in determining the product to be sold. Management has more detailed information about the market,

CONSUMER TESTING AS A GUIDE FOR TECHNICAL RESEARCH 105 and about the requirements for successful products. Management fur- thermore is responsible for the commercial success of the product. This breeds a natural tendency to rely most heavily on one's own judgment. It is considered good practice, if not essential, to run some sort of a con- sumer test on the product after management feels that the development has progressed to a point where the product is nearly ready to be marketed. This permits a last minute check before going to the expense of setting up advertising and promotional campaigns. It provides a form of insur- ance which is relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of putting on the market a product which the consumer may not like. The above has summarized briefly a common procedure for utilizing and tying-in technical research with product improvement and product development. This is only one way of guiding technical' research in its effort to provide better consumer goods. A somewhat different procedure has been found useful in the field of processed foods. Much of this procedure is readily adaptable to the cosmetic field. Essentially, the four steps in this pro- cedure as applied to foods are as follows: 1. Bench-Top Testing for Obvious Defects--The research man and his co-workers taste samples and otherwise evaluate them for appearance, color, texture, feel, etc. This step is considered to be only a matter of screening out obvious defects. For example, certain tastes are generally recognized as undesirable, such as staleness in coffee, cooked flavor or ex- cessive peel oil in orange juice, musty flavor and many others which come readily to mind. The mere fact that a sample is believed to be different from some standard or control is not ordinarily considered a defect at this stage. 2. Panel Testing for Difference--Samples which have shown no glaring defects are then submitted to panels trained and screened to include only tasters of demonstrated sensitivity and ability to recognize small flavor and texture differences. This panel usually works with the familiar tri- angle test which consists of testing three samples, two of which are identi- cal. The judge is asked to identify which one of the three is different from the other two. Use of this test permits a statistical evaluation of the results to show whether the judges were actually able to recognize the presumed difference between samples or were merely guessing. Besides looking for a difference this trained panel is asked to describe in what way the samples differ and to give some measure of how different they may be. For rea- sons which will be apparent later they are never asked to express their preferences for the samples. These panels usually consist of about 10 to 15 people who may participate in two triangle tests at one time giving a total of 20 to 30 judgments. The results are analyzed by the chi-square procedure to determine the significance of the findings.