Industrial Applications

Is an ITQI award better than ISO

2020/05/27

ITQI (International Taste Quality Institute) claims that they have employed several chief chefs and tasting masters to judge the samples via fair/independent mechanism. They will award the product based on the scores the expert judges give to the sample as the top delicious food/beverage. Food related company can use this award as the marketing tool. We, however, do not recommend this system after we realize the process that they employed. What real benefits that food related company can obtain through the award will be a question mark.

There are 4 questions that we will raise for the ITQI system.

  1. The expert judges (famous chef and flavor master) do not represent the consumers. As we all can see in our real life that the movie that got Oscar award is not necessary selling the best. Why? The experts who judge Oscar are not consumers. Art is different from science.
  2. The judging items are collective nouns (like appearance) not the specific sensory attributes. The problem here will be judge A focuses on color for appearance while judge B focuses on surface character for appearance. How can we say they are judging on the same appearance? If not, it will be the problem to deal with the results on appearance of X product.
  3. You would obtain a score but you do not know your characters. No product is perfect. Some special characters should be buried with consumers’ mind that you are not able to obtain in this expert system.>
  4. You can get suggestions to your product from the experts if you pay extra fee. The problems will be what if you get different opinions from different experts. Which one should you follow?

There are 3 benefits you would get if you employed the scientific procedures following ISO guidance. They are

  1. You can have the scientific data with credibility.
  2. You can have meaningful sensory data and for you to improve.
  3. You can have the data for long term comparison.
Which one can be your better marketing claim tool for long term benefit should be obvious.