Opinion vs. Reality
When you try a new food, you’re only interested in one question: “Do I like this thing I’m eating?”
There’s an entire career built around answering that same question a different way. Sensory Scientists — the professionals who run these evaluations for a living — are trying, to the best of their ability, to avoid answering it the way you just did.
They’re trying to NOT make a SUBJECTIVE decision (I like this, so it’s good), but rather an OBJECTIVE one (this is good, regardless of whether I like it). In other words, they don’t ask “do I think this food is good?” but rather, “is it good, period?” The difference between the two approaches is opinion versus reality.
This is hard. After all, there are a lot of things going on with food that contribute to taste, and only some of those things are objective FACTS — the rest are all opinion, right??
Here’s why it’s worth the trouble: a food company can’t afford to launch a product based on what one person in a taste-test room happens to like. A bad launch costs real money — sometimes millions of dollars in ingredients, manufacturing, and marketing, all riding on whether strangers who’ve never met the person who invented the recipe will actually want to eat it. So Sensory Scientists aren’t trying to figure out if one person will like a food — they’re trying to determine if LOTS of people will. They’re trying to understand how Taste, Flavor, and Palatability are working together to make a food objectively “good,” at a scale that justifies the investment.
To do this objective analysis, professionals use the 9-point hedonic scale. Before we get into the scale and how it’s used, let’s take a second and pull everything we’ve learned about taste and flavor and put it all together.
Food Acceptability
Food acceptability is the technical term for how likely a food is to actually get eaten — not by one person, but by a broad group of people, measured objectively rather than by personal preference. It’s what Sensory Scientists are actually measuring when they run a hedonic scale study: whether a product clears the bar that predicts most people would eat it again.
Beyond the Plate
If you look at the Food Acceptability chart above, you’ll notice the basic tastes are all represented, along with texture, temperature, aroma, and astringency — everything we’ve already covered in this series. But it also names a few more components that determine how much you actually like a dish, ones almost nobody thinks about on purpose. Here they are:
Appearance
Color and shape change what you expect to taste, and that expectation colors the actual experience — before you’ve taken a single bite. This isn’t a metaphor: in real taste tests, people rate an identically flavored drink as tasting different depending on what color it’s dyed. Redder food reads as sweeter. Rounder shapes read as sweeter too; sharper, more angular shapes read as more bitter or sour. Glossiness does its own work — a glossy sauce reads as richer than a matte one at the exact same fat content.
None of this is imagination. It’s your brain building a prediction first, then checking your mouth against it.
Thickness
This is “fullness” or “body” — how rich and mouth-coating something feels, independent of its actual flavor. A thin broth and a velouté can taste identical and still feel completely different in the mouth; that weight alone does real work on how “satisfying” a dish reads, even though it isn’t a flavor at all.
Personal Condition
Your body’s current state changes what you taste, sometimes dramatically. A cold is the obvious example — you already know from Part 2 that most of what you perceive as taste is actually retronasal aroma, so a blocked nose genuinely can’t deliver that information, and food goes flat and boring for as long as you’re congested. Less obvious: depression is associated with a real, documented blunting of food pleasure — it’s not that a depressed person is choosing to find food less enjoyable, their actual sensory reward response is measurably dulled. Mood, illness, medication, even how tired you are all sit quietly underneath every bite you take.
Upbringing
What you grew up eating, and where you grew up eating it, shapes what you find balanced versus off long before you ever sit down to a specific meal. The exact same dish can read as completely normal to one person and strange to another — not because one of them is wrong, but because “correct” flavor is partly a matter of what your palate was trained on as a kid, not just what’s on the plate now.
The Rest of It
And then there’s everything else — the genuine psychology of preference, which researchers still don’t fully understand. Why you crave a specific food on a specific day. Why a dish you loved once suddenly doesn’t land the same way. Some of preference really is that far beneath the hood — not undiscovered exactly, just not fully mappable, even by the people who study this for a living.
Fun Fact About the Word “Hedonic”
The word “hedonic” means “related to pleasure.” Therefore, a Hedonic scale measures how much something does or does not make you happy. It comes from the same root that gives us the word “hedonism,” the philosophy that the most important thing any human can do during life is pursue their own pleasure.
The 9-point hedonic scale was developed in the 1950’s by David Peryam for the U.S. Armed Forces when they were measuring the food preferences of soldiers. Feeding an army is key to winning the war, and the army had a terrible reputation for serving nasty dinners. They wanted to change that, but they kept running into the problem of opinion overshadowing facts. Hence – the creation of a scale that would get rid of personal feelings.
The scale was quickly adopted by the broader food industry, and it’s now used for far more than just food — personal care products, household goods, cosmetics, all of it. This method is also called a sensory evaluation, because it focuses in on the senses with as little room for personal opinion as possible.
Here’s how you would grade or “scale” something you were tasting. You would take a bite, then think about each sensory input – taste, texture, aroma, etc – and mark your thoughts on a scale of 1 – 9, with 1 being this is really terrible and I’m angry you asked me to try it and 9 being make more of this and give it to me or I will rain down destruction.
9-Like Extremely
8-Like Very Much
7-Like Moderately
6-Like Slightly
5-Neither Like nor Dislike
4-Dislike Slightly
3-Dislike Moderately
2-Dislike Very Much
1-Dislike Extremely
Sometimes, they don’t make testers pick a number, they ask them to pick a smiley or frowny face that reflects what they thought of the food – this is especially used with little kids. And teenagers who DON’T LIKE TO READ THINGS.
The Five Categories
Most people need real guidance the first time they actually start evaluating food — a description and a picture of the scale isn’t enough on its own. Working chefs are FAMOUS for needing extra help evaluating food this way.
Who knew? Working chefs are both very opinionated and stubborn.
Anyhoo…. Here’s what professionals ask taste testers when judging each category.
Taste
Strangely, many judges find this the hardest category to nail down, even though it seems like it should be the easiest. Take a bite. Consider your first impression. Take a second bite and move the food around your mouth — you’re checking whether the food tastes the way it smelled, and whether that first impression holds up.
Consider the sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and spiciness of the food. Is one of these predominant over the others, or is it balanced? Is there ONE specific thing you’d change to make it better? Note any aftertaste. For example: a lasagna that tastes like fresh tomatoes, pecorino, and too much oregano, with an unwanted sweetness reminiscent of a bad frozen dinner, not spicy, not sour, and a little dry from needing more sauce — that’s not “it’s bad.” That’s a specific, actionable diagnosis, and it lands at about a 4 out of 9.
Texture
Texture plays a real role in preference — most people prefer a range of textures over just one note, and crunchy generally beats mushy. Think about how the food feels in your mouth: crunchy, soft, chewy, crisp? Variety is usually a good sign; one texture straight through the whole bite usually reads as a flaw, even when the flavor is fine.
Aroma
You already know from Part 2 of this series that most of what you perceive as “taste” is actually aroma, not your tongue. Hold the plate to your nose and inhale deeply before you ever take a bite. Note any specific scents — you might catch individual ingredients, or the smell might trigger a memory entirely (comfort food does this constantly).
Appearance
Rate the appearance of the sample you’re served — not the full plated presentation. In a sensory evaluation, appearance means the food itself, not the garnish or the plating style. Scoop some onto a fork and look closely: is it uniform in color, varied, dark and muddy, appealing? Would you want to try it based on how it looks alone?
Overall
This isn’t your own math from the four categories above — it’s a genuine gut read on the dish as a whole. Did it meet or exceed expectations? Did the cook succeed in making something tasty, visually appealing, well-textured, and pleasant-smelling that most people would enjoy? A baseball analogy works here: was it a home run, a solid double, or a swing-and-a-miss?
Evaluating vs. Fixing
Notice this is the same underlying skill as the mac-and-cheese diagnosis in Balancing Flavors — just running in the opposite direction. Fixing a dish means tasting it, naming the problem, and correcting it forward. Evaluating a dish means tasting it and scoring it backward, one element at a time, with the same specific, one-word-at-a-time precision.
A chef who can’t evaluate honestly can’t fix accurately either — they’re the same muscle.