Evaluation of the Pivot Profile©, a new method to characterize a large variety of a single product: Case study on honeys from around the world

Abstract

Honey is a natural product with very diverse sensory attributes that are influenced by the flower source, the bee species, the geographic origin, the treatments and conditions during storage. This study aimed at describing 50 honeys from diverse flower sources in different continents and islands, stored under various conditions. Many articles have been published on the sensory characterization of honeys, thus a common list of attributes has been established, but it appeared to be poorly suited to describe a large number of honeys from around the world. This is why the novel and rapid sensory evaluation method, the Pivot Profile©, was tested, with the participation of 15 panelists during five sessions. The first objective was to obtain a sensory description of the 50 honeys that were tested. From 1152 distinct terms, a list of 29 sensory attributes was established and the attributes divided into three categories: color/texture (8 terms), aroma (16 terms), and taste (5 terms). At first, the honeys have been ranked according to their level of crystallization from fluid/liquid to viscous/hard. Then color was the second assessment factor of the variability. In terms of aroma, honeys from Africa were characterized by smoky, resin, caramel and dried fruit as opposed to floral and fruity, mainly for honeys from South America and Europe. Finally, the honeys were ranked according to their sweetness. The second objective of this study was to test the new sensory method, called Pivot Profile© which is used to describe a large number of products with interpretable results.

Evaluation of rapid descriptive sensory methods with different panels in the characteristics variations of beers packaged in distinct materials

“…According to Deneulin et al (2018) several methods were recently developed to reduce the time of training sessions for a vocabulary of conventional descriptive methods. Although Research, Society andDevelopment, v. 9, n. 9, e08996137, 2020 (CC BY 4.0) | ISSN 2525-3409 | DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v9i9.6137 13 no training was applied, results in the current study suggest that a short training (about 30 or 40 minutes) could have some impact on test quality, as judges would recognize better the product's attributes.…”

“…These rapid descriptive tests, with qualitative or quantitative evaluation of the sensorial characteristics of a new product, are considered a great alternative due to its less required time and costs (Valentin, Chollet Lelièvre & Abdi, 2012). The Pivot Profile (a reference method) and the Projective Mapping (a similarity method) can be highlighted (Deneulin, Reverdy, Rébénaque, Danthe & Mulhauser, 2018;Esmerino et al, 2017;Pagès, 2005).…”

A modified version of the sensory Pivot technique as a possible tool for the analysis of food adulteration: A case of coffee

“…It should be mentioned that the Pivot sample is not usually considered for statistical calculations in current investigations where the PP technique is used for the sensory characterization of foods using this technique (Deneulin et al, 2018;Lelièvre-Desmas et al, 2017;Miraballes et al, 2018;Rios-Mera et al, 2019;Thuillier et al, 2015).…”

“…The Pivot technique is a reference-based approach to free sensory product description (Thuillier, Valentin, Marchal, & Dacremont, 2015). It has been used in the description of wines, (Pearson, Schmidtke, Francis, & Blackman, 2020;Thuillier et al, 2015), chocolate ice cream (Fonseca et al, 2016); Greek yogurt (Esmerino et al, 2017); honeys (Deneulin, Reverdy, Rébénaque, Danthe, & Mulhauser, 2018), and beef burgers (Rios-Mera et al, 2019). This is why the Pivot technique (Thuillier et al, 2015) can be a suitable tool for the analysis of adulterated food since: it can be carried out with consumers, its execution is easy, it allows the comparison of products (Pivot or reference sample vs. other samples) and the results can be analyzed using different multivariate techniques available in the field of food adulteration such as discriminant analysis (DA), correspondence analysis (CA), among others (Karoui, Mazerolles, Bosset, de Baerdemaeker, & Dufour, 2007).…”

Obtaining and Characterisation of Starch-Based Edible Films Incorporating Honey, Propolis and Bee Bread

“…Honey and bee hive products as propolis, pollen, royal jelly or bee bread are valuable natural products containing bioactive compounds with anticancer, antimelanogenic, antibacterial, antioxidant action (Aumeeruddy et al, 2019;Pasupuleti et al, 2017). Honey has a very pleasant taste, too, given by the high content in sugars and odour molecules from plants (Deneulin et al, 2018). Propolis is pleasant, too (Wang, 2013).…”