Only Tastry has unlocked how human senses interpret product chemistry
Tastry’s Science of the Senses
Tastry was founded based on the need to reform the way food and beverages were evaluated. Rather than the subjective views of tasting panels and critics, we identified the need to provide consumers with more objective data. Therefore, we set out to develop chemometric alternatives that harness the powers of chemistry with mathematical and statistical methods, to turn our senses into science.
case study
Tastry’s role in the wine industry
Chemical Analysis
Wineries across the United States send wine samples to the Tastry lab where we test and analyze thousands of chemical properties of wine.
Artificial Intelligence Engine
Data from each product analysis is fed into a proprietary AI engine to “learn” its place in product comparisons and palate matches.
Palate Matches
Wine lovers create an account, take a brief palate survey, and receive match percentages for every wine, based on their own unique taste preferences.
No one argues with the incontestable fact that tasting is a subjective endeavor. The measure of an effective wine critic should be his or her timely and useful rendering of an intelligent laundry list of good examples of different styles of winemaking in various price categories.
Robert Parker
Problems with Human Sensory Panels
The data obtained from human sensory evaluation is inherently inconsistent. Even with the most carefully designed method, a panelist’s personal preferences and acuity change dramatically from a large number of factors. Unlike chemistry, there is no way to completely control a human-issued sensory test. Accuracy isn’t the only issue. In the beer and wine industries, trained panels are expensive to perform. Moreover, trained panelists do not perceive tastes the same way the general population does. So the outputs from an expensive and inherently flawed panel are difficult to apply to a target consumer base.
Substituting Humans with Analytical Chemistry
Though once thought impossible, Tastry has successfully developed proprietary methods for quality evaluation and market performance prediction of food, beverages, fragrances and other sensory products. We employ these to provide hyper-specific product recommenders for retail that don’t rely on human panels. With this analytical chemistry based framework, we are able to rank and subdivide products according to the preferences of a user or demographic. This permits artisans and manufacturers to integrate sensory information at every stage of product development – from formulation to marketing, optimization of sales margins and even the best geographic distribution.
The Tastry Way
Tastry sensory science based recommenders do just what Robert Parker proposes: they narrow down an inventory of products to those that specific palates are most likely to enjoy, and allow the user to filter resulting matches based on price, occasion, how well they match a friend’s preferences, how well they complement other products (like pairing wine with food), and more. The applications of this data is limited only by the imaginations of the makers and retailers who take advantage of it. At Tastry, we like to say “we taught a computer how to taste.” But we also taught it how to match the palates and preferences of individuals and groups of consumers. Tastry will power the future of commerce, not purely with product data, but by its intimate connection to the data that powers the human senses.