Quality Assurance and Sensory Evaluation in Foodservice— a New Course for Foodservice Managers
Authors: Fox Morton 
Published: March 2007

Students graduating from an accredited school in travel industry management or hotel, restaurant and institutional management should have an appreciation of quality assurance and sensory evaluation in foodservice. This type of information cannot be acquired strictly through lectures; it also requires laboratory sessions where objective quality assurance procedures are taught along with subjective sensory evaluation procedures.

In the School of Travel Industry Management at the University of Hawaii, a course was developed for hotel and restaurant management majors to give them an appreciation of this subject. Morton Fox, associate professoroffoodservice systems whose background is in food science and food engineering, designedthe laboratory for this course and subsequently developed the course.

This three-credit course consists of two 50-minute lectures and one three-hour laboratory session per week. Two textbooks plus numerous outside references are used for the course. A majority of the lecture material comes from Quality Control in Foodservice, Revised Edition (1983) by Thorner and Manning, with the sensory evaluation information coming from Basic Principles of Sensory Evaluation, STP433 (1968) published by the American Society for Testing Materials.

The laboratory experiments were developedforstudents with a limited scientific background, since the School of Travel Industry Management is in the College of Business Administration. The first two weeks are devoted to familiarization with laboratory equipment as most of the students had not been exposed to this type of equipmentbefore. Relativelysimple experiments were developedforusing different types of thermometers and scales, volumetric measures, gauges, hydrometers, refractometers, pH meter, viscosimeter, fat analyzer, spectrophotometer, and microscope. At first, the students were overwhelmed, butquicklyfoundouthoweasy these instruments were to use andbecame quite confident in theirabilityto use them. The next experiment dealt with calibrating the instruments and equipment in the main kitchen. They learned how to calibrate thermostats on ovens, timers on cooking equipment, and thermometers. Otherexperiments included performing cutting tests and writing specifications based on recipe requirements; precooking, cooking, and post-cooking quality controls; receiving, sampling, and production-inspeciion con trol; nutritional considerations in cooking with a nutritional analysis through simple titration; the role of bacteria in the deterioration of food and sanitation quality control; and water quality and ware washing control. The last four laboratory periods are devoted to sensory evaluation starting off with training of taste test panelists. This is followed by an experiment explaining the use of statistics in sensory evaluation; and then flavor identification through gas chromatography. The final experiment deals with beverage taste testing panel procedures and leaves a good taste for the course in the students' mouths as a wine tasting is conducted.

This same laboratory and course material are used in the TIM School's professional program for food and beverage industry members in Hawaii.