Winter 2026 35 The lab isn’t the only place you can hold a taste test. It’s also fun to have one with friends. But doing it right is more complex than you might think — potential bias abounds. Let’s say you want to compare three kinds of honey. Follow these basic guidelines: How to host a taste test Tell guests to come prepared: They should avoid perfume, smoking, brushing teeth, chewing gum, eating candies or drinking coffee for at least one hour before they arrive. (For your part, don’t serve refreshments until after the test.) 1 Prepare samples so each kind is presented in the same way: same portion size, same temperature. If serving honey on bread, for instance, cut off the crusts. 3 Ideally, separate the testers from one another. No chatting during the test. 2 Assign random numbers to the three samples — 122, 413, 709 — and label them accordingly. Mix up the order when presenting them to your testers, so they’re not all tasting the same thing at once. 4 Wait a minute between tests and provide a palate cleanser. The sensory labs typically use water but sometimes also give a single unsalted saltine cracker (for a fruit test, say) or apple slice or grape (for cheese tests). 5 If you want to be really serious about the data you collect, check out the DIY resources OSU offers to entrepreneurial food makers and farmers at beav.es/xfc. 6 Some products are less familiar. Testers compared syrup produced by Pacific Northwest bigleaf maples with syrup from sugar maples. Several bigleaf maple syrups were statistically preferred, with testers finding their flavor more complex and higher in quality. (Watch out, Vermont!) Another test evaluated olive oils: two from the Willamette Valley, as well as oils from California, Italy and Greece. This was the good stuff — early harvest with the strongest flavor — and testers sampled it plain, with bread and over vanilla ice cream (!). Oregon’s bounty was again preferred, showing our state’s products can compete on a global scale. Beyond bringing more yum into the world, the results of these taste tests can sometimes have an unexpected, and powerful, impact. An initiative that got a lot of press recently compared fresh and frozen seafoods. Conventional wisdom is that fresh is best, but in multiple blind taste tests of salmon, albacore tuna, sablefish, scallops and more tasters declared that frozen seafood was as good as or better than fresh — a finding with huge potential benefits for the environment. A third of supermarket seafood is thrown away because it isn’t purchased fast enough, Colonna said. When it opened in 1999, OSU’s Food Innovation Center was the nation’s only branch experiment station like this in an urban area. (Since then, a few other universities — like University of Hawaii at Manoa — have modeled facilities after it.) A key advantage of the urban location is the availabili-
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