Co-Design with Our Users: Analyzing Performance in a CATA Experiment and Further Developing CATATIS with Givaudan

Laure Bonnet, the Sensory Project Manager at Givaudan, was conducting research on six fish-flavored products using a CATA task but found herself questioning some of the data. 

For this research, Bonnet was using the Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) test which is one of the so-called Rapid Tasks that is typically conducted with consumers to understand their perceptions of products. 

While conducting CATA test, Bonnet noticed an incompatibility between traditional CATA data analysis methods and the nature of the data when collected by means of a trained panel. Since judges were evaluating products multiple times across different sessions, it called the accuracy of the agreement between repeatability and judges (homogeneity/consistency of the panel) into question.

This led to a collaboration between Givaudan (Laure Bonnet), Oniris (Pr. El Mostafa Qannari, Thibault Ferney, and Thibaut Riedel), and XLSTAT (Dr. Fabien Llobell) to further develop the CATATIS feature.

Bonnet and her team first conducted three sessions with a total of 12 subjects who evaluated 27 taste and smell attributes for each fish-flavored product. Once the study was completed, the XLSTAT team coded all the innovative methods used during the collaboration in the CATATIS feature of the XLSTAT software to improve the feature.

To learn more about this process and the new functionalities of the CATATIS feature, read the full case study developed with Laure Bonnet.