Food Safety Matters - Ep. 180

Dr. Carolyn Ross: Where Sensory Science Meets Food Safety and Quality
Release Date: October 22, 2024

Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with Dr. Carolyn Ross, Director of the Sensory Science Center at Washington State University. Dr. Ross and host Adrienne Blum explore how innovative sensory and analytical technologies intersect with food safety and quality. They cover cutting-edge research projects, sensory evaluation tools like the E-tongue, and how such tools inform both scientific understanding and commercial practice. The discussion also touches upon Dr. Ross’s work with special populations, future directions at the intersection of sensory science and AI, and the challenges of integrating new analytical methods into real-world food safety scenarios.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Ross’s Research Programs and Focus Areas

• Sensory Science & Food Texture

  • Dr. Ross leads diverse projects in the Sensory Science Center, focusing particularly on the perception of food texture in two crucial populations—older adults and children with intellectual and developmental delays.
  • For older adults, maintaining food texture encourages eating, enjoyment, and socialization. For children with developmental delays, increasing exposure and skills related to varied textures supports longer-term nutrition and eating comfort.
  • “For our older adults, we're interested in looking at maintaining their food texture through their lifetime because it does inspire them to eat more foods. It makes the food more interesting, more social.” (25:19, Dr. Ross)

• Product-Specific Research

  • Current projects include optimizing mozzarella cheese for both functional (meltability for pizza) and sensory properties.
  • Packaging research explores effects of material, shape, and storage on milk quality—including 3D printed packaging and attention to chemical and physical safety.

2. Packaging & Food Contact Materials

• Dr. Ross’s team considers not only how well packaging functions (e.g., not leaking) but also chemical safety (migrants, particulates) and sustainability in material selection.
  • “We're looking at the chemical safety as well as in microparticulates and those plastic compounds. So absolutely, that's feeding into our decision making process.” (27:18, Dr. Ross)

3. Innovative Sensory Technology: The E-Tongue

• What is the E-Tongue?

  • An analytical tool that detects non-volatile compounds—correlating to taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, spicy, metallic)—but not aromas.
  • Useful where human testers may experience fatigue, e.g., bitter, spicy, or otherwise intense samples (pharmaceuticals, fortified foods).
  • Helps pre-select samples for further sensory testing, supporting efficient panel management.

• Applications & Impact

  • Used for optimizing non-nutritive sweeteners, studying bitterness blockers in pharmaceuticals, and researching fortification effects in foods.
  • Applied in wine studies to detect spoilage faults before they become evident to human panels:
    • “We were looking at detecting wine fault development in red and white wines and then comparing the response of the ETONG to the trained sensory evaluation panel and seeing, well, can the ETONG predict a fault earlier than sensory evaluation can?” (30:48, Dr. Ross)

• Industry Adoption

  • Mainly used in research, not yet widely adopted commercially, but shows promise for building reference libraries of taste profiles within product categories.

4. Other Sensory Technologies & Future Excitement

• E-Nose & Analytical Chemistry

  • Dr. Ross’s lab uses gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for volatile analysis rather than employing an E-nose. She notes the synergy between holistic sensory response and analytical data.

• AI and Sensory Data

  • Dr. Ross strongly supports the use of AI to integrate diverse data streams—from panelist feedback to analytical measures—to advance predictive models for sensory perception and quality/safety outcomes.
    • “AI opens up that opportunity. So understanding and gathering more information about the individual data themselves, being able to collect data from different diverse sources...and putting that all into the model as well as some of those analytical measures.” (34:35, Dr. Ross)

• Oral Processing & Individual Perception

  • There’s burgeoning interest in studying differences in how people eat, process, and perceive foods—beyond mere chemistry and nutrition—opening new avenues for research and product development.
    • Discussion on perception idiosyncrasies like “cilantro tastes like soap” and “supertasters” (36:21, Blum & Ross).

5. Linking Research and Education

• Integrated Curriculum
  • Dr. Ross blends sensory and instrumental analysis in her teaching, so students learn to synthesize both disciplines for careers in food safety and QA, not think of them as silos.
    • “For me, it's really important to have the students understand that these things can build off each other and support each other and they're not siloed...” (37:58, Dr. Ross)
  • Emphasis on data analysis and statistics as cross-cutting skills.

6. Special Populations and Sensory Research

• Her Fulbright Australia work addressed food texture in children with intellectual and developmental delays (IDDs):
  • Found that up to 80% of children with IDDs have feeding challenges.
  • The aim: to create a stepped approach to texture exposure—akin to “stages” in baby foods—to improve texture acceptance and oral skills over time.
    • “If we have something like that for solid foods where they start with a texture that's easier for them...and then they gain experience and confidence with that...they can move up toward the leafy combination textures which, you know, we see with vegetables and other, more nutrient dense foods.” (41:10, Dr. Ross)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“We bought that [E-tongue] in 2012.... It looks at non volatile compounds... So compounds such as spicy compounds, your sensory panelists can only try so many before they get fatigued.”
— Dr. Carolyn Ross, 28:09

“The ability to taste propyl thioacil and how that can change your perception—are you perceiving it differently or are you describing it differently? Am I perceiving it the same as you, but we're just using different words, or are we actually legitimately perceiving it differently?”
— Dr. Carolyn Ross, 36:57

“For me, it's really important to have the students understand that these things can build off each other and support each other and they're not siloed...”
— Dr. Carolyn Ross, 37:59

“One in six children in the United States have intellectual developmental delays, and within that population, about 80%... have feeding difficulties.”
— Dr. Carolyn Ross, 39:43

Important Segment Timestamps

• Dr. Carolyn Ross Introduction & Sensory Science Center Overview
  [24:22–25:03]

• Texture Research with Elderly & Children with IDDs
  [25:03–26:44]

• Packaging Research & Food Contact Materials
  [26:44–27:38]

• E-Tongue Technology & Applications
  [28:02–30:43]

• E-Tongue in Wine Fault Detection
  [30:43–31:33]

• E-Tongue vs. Human Sensory Detection
  [32:31–32:51]

• Analytical Technologies, E-Nose, and AI in Sensory Science
  [33:41–36:21]

• Teaching, Integration of Sensory & Instrumental Analysis
  [37:30–39:14]

• IDDS, Fulbright Research in Australia, Texture Ladder for Children
  [39:14–41:58]

Episode Takeaways

• Sensory science is a rapidly evolving field with direct implications for food safety and quality—new tools like the E-tongue and integration of AI offer possibilities to detect food hazards earlier and with greater confidence.
• Attention to special populations (elderly, children with IDDs) can guide food texture design, improving nutrition and eating experience.
• Packaging research increasingly considers both physical integrity and chemical safety, especially with new materials and sustainability mandates.
• Training for food scientists should integrate both analytical and sensory methods to meet the diverse challenges of modern food safety and quality assurance.

For more information and all referenced studies, visit the show notes at food-safety.com.