SENSO EXCEL: A TOOL IN EXCEL-VBA FOR SENSORY FOOD ANALYSIS

Sensory analysis is an essential tool for the food industry, making it one of the main components in quality control, evaluation of food stability in its shelf life, in product development process, being considered by industries of the great value, allowing, through the sense organs, to evaluate and ensure the quality of products, and offering great results with low investment. Nowadays, there are a number of specialized companies that produce software for both data acquisition and statistical analysis of sensory testing, but despite this variety, many softwares are proprietary or have little flexibility in customizing the required tests, as well as some difficulty to learning. In this work, the main objective was the development of a simple tool in the Excel spreadsheet , which supports the following sensory testing methods: triangular test, duo-trio, ordination , multiple comparison and affective acceptance test by hedonic scale. The selection of the Excel platform was motivated by its widespread use and easy accessibility. The VBA language was used through the macros procedure to implement the computational codes needed to perform the statistical tests. The tool proved to be practical and robust in solving the proposed problems, being easily accessible, with a fast learning curve and capable of producing reliable statistical results from the applied sensory tests. In addition, the software proves to be of great academic and industrial interest, allowing to obtain clear and concise information and with final results in less time, since in the current process this compilation is tedious and is time consuming. The software is useful during the development or improvement of products, when it is important to carefully note consumer preferences and to relate it to descriptive characteristics in order to ensure good product acceptance.