Ham Taste Panel

I've been taste testing ham for two weeks and I'm almost done with this round. If you know me you know I am not a ham lover, but it hasn't been that bad. I like some of them and some of them taste like they were soaked in some sort of chemical. The director of the panel informed us that we are now worthless for panels in which we like or do not like a product. We take the ham apart in our job. We smell it many times to detect the levels of Smoke, Salt, Sugar, Chemical or Artificial, Old Meat, etc. We do the same things for appearance(color, grainy or now, holes, dots, dry or moist), texture and mouth feel, taste and then after taste. We never get to tell them if we liked it or didn't, just the amount on a scale of the attributes we are measuring. Taste panel may sound like fun, but we really have to work for our money. We now get to use touch screens to give our answers, faster because you can't double check, once you pass a page you can't go back and change your answers. Bacon starts again in a few weeks and so far we only have 6 days scheduled. I've been doing this for 14 years off and on.

They do test our taste palettes and I have better then chance taste buds at telling one ham from another. Same with the other panels I am on, Bacon, Salsa, Ribs, BBQ Shredded Pork, Plain Shredded Pork and now Ham. The test consist of having three samples in front of you. One is a reference sample and then two others. One is the same as the ref. sample and one isn't. You need to tell them which isn't the same as the ref. Sometimes they give you the same ham, just produced on different days. Not as easy then. We test two different days and have six different sets to test a day. 12 people are chosen and then the panel starts. One guy this time dropped out, demanding line of work. For heaven sakes it is an hour or two a day, a few weeks a year, that is tough.(hahahahaha)