Organoleptics assesses the sensory qualities of fresh produce, like taste, aroma, texture and appearance, all crucial for evaluating quality and freshness
Consider the blueberry. Any single specimen of that particular fruit might belong to one of 30 or more varieties on the market. Before choosing which to stock, Spinneys will convene a special panel to assess what kind of “eating experience” is offered by the latest contenders.
Neil Gibson, produce commercial manager, is invariably one of those decision makers. “We’ll be looking at the structure and balance of flavours,” he says. “The sweetness, in terms of sugar levels, as well as acidity, texture, mouthfeel, how juicy it is.”
All such elements combined make up the organoleptic profile of a given product – those factors that stimulate sensory responses and define its overall tastiness. And in the case of the blueberry, Neil can especially recommend a recent pick called Pop, a variety produced through the Sekoya breeding programme at Fall Creek in Oregon, USA.
“It ticks a lot of our boxes, with a nice crunch to it, the right sweetness, very juicy. It does taste a bit sharper than others so perhaps not appealing to every single customer, but by and large the best we’ve seen this year, and the one we’re backing and buying most of.”
Neil and others on our team have developed their expertise through experience, as organoleptics have become ever more vital to choosing the best fruits and vegetables, satisfying the broadest range of shoppers and thereby edging out the competition.
“In an organisation like Spinneys we’re always wanting to get better, and we spend a lot of time working on our palates to make sure they’re right for tasting the products that we’re going to put in front of customers.” His colleague Angelique Du Toit, for example, has refined her own palate into a specialised affinity for tomatoes.
“When you’ve been working in the industry over multiple seasons, in multiple categories, and you start tasting a specific product daily, or weekly, or monthly, you start to pick up a sense for things like acidity and sweetness,” says Angelique. “When tomatoes arrive we taste them together to give feedback, but I’ve also learnt a lot from seed companies on variety development. Your palate develops as the industry changes and those new flavours come through.
The tomatoes we were tasting for Spinneys on the Isle of Wight recently were amazing, with very different profiles from what we’ve been used to the last five years.”
A field test like that might involve Neil, Angelique and technical and commercial reps from the supplier in question, while an assessment at head office could draw in up to 20 staff.
“Especially for top-tier branding, when we need to check whether people agree with us that one product is superior to another.” Consensus is required, in other words, for Spinneys Premium Range, whereby a curated selection of the tastiest items in store are packaged under a special gold label. One recent example would be the AVA Magnum® variety of strawberry, newly imported from Scotland. “We sourced it for the first time last year and we’re super happy with it. The eat has more depth than the standard product, with higher sugar levels.”
Those levels are determined by the Brix count – the concentration of dissolved sugar/sucrose that effectively determines the sweetness of fresh produce. An instrument called a Refractometer will give an empirical reading on that, but Neil says the team likes to guess first on the basis of taste alone, then see if that matches the official measure.
“If it feels sweet then it usually is, so the reading ideally backs us up. If it doesn’t, then it could be the acidity levels masking the Brix, and in some ways that can give more depth of flavour.” Brix is an especially big deal when it comes to terroir, that compound of environmental factors – soil, climate, topography etc – now often used in a wine-making context but no less relevant to fruit-growing.
“Growers always tell us they have their own microclimate,” says Neil. “If they have cooler weather the sugars build more slowly, and if they have warmer climate they believe the sun is generating those higher sugar levels, which is different ways of achieving the same goal if you like.” Climate change may yet play havoc with Brix levels, as recent hurricanes have done to Florida oranges for example.
It may also be that such events increase the general dependence on agrotech hubs like Dubai’s own Pure Harvest – a fully climate-controlled growing station in the desert that can maintain consistent conditions and results in producing essentials like tomatoes, while Spanish or British farmers must contend with certain vagaries and variables of local weather systems. From Spinneys perspective, the goal is a kind of adaptability that allows for quick, efficient pivots to the best available sources and supply lines.
From the consumer point of view, it might be worth asking whether the average shopper is sufficiently attuned to the finer points of organoleptics that experts must train their palate to discern. Sweeter, sharper, fresher on the nose – can most of us even tell the difference?
“Put it this way,” says Neil. “When we’ve made a decision to source our products around the most tasty examples, we’ve sold more of them. Take our shift away from USA-grown strawberries, which were more geared toward shelf life and not such good eating. We sourced a much softer, juicier berry from the UK, a much more enjoyable eat, and we doubled our sales in that category in the last four years. There are other reasons for that, but the overriding one is taste. It’s the thing that keeps people coming back.”
