Electronic nose and sensorial 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 interaction'. Nevertheless, human senses, when considered as instruments, show several problems of reproducibility, stability and difficulties of expression, making it very hard to compare results between different panels. The electronic nose has been proven to be sufficiently accurate as an artificial approximation of the human olfaction apparatus when applied to well defined problems in food analysis. In this paper results obtained for tomato pastes and milk analysis, comparing a panel of tasters and an electronic nose will be presented and discussed.