6. Interpretation of results

Sensory evaluation is a group activity, even if the activity of the solitary expert falls within the scope of this discipline if he or she complies with a certain number of the technique's founding rules, such as the anonymity of samples. The reason why the moderator addresses a group of subjects rather than a single subject is that he knows that there are differences between subjects and wants to take this into account. These differences are obvious in the field of preferences, but they also exist in the discriminative and quantitative fields. For many years, these differences were considered to be a flaw: the group leader would try to eliminate them, and the writer of the written report would try to hide them. But this perspective is erroneous: inter-individual differences are a rich source of sensory evaluation, even if they obviously complicate the analysis, interpretation and extrapolation...