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Mark Kerslake
experimental designs, as well as to discover how these evolving techniques can be used to design foods that deliver optimized consumer preference.
I. INTRODUCTION In antiquity, survival was the primal need and man was busy chasing protein to provide sustenance to fight off hunger, the cold, aggressors, etc. As basic needs were met more time was spent in the pursuit of pleasurable experiences often associated with food. Under Louis XIV, Le Potager du roi at Versailles, the king’s vegetable garden, was established as the leading innovative food-producing institution of its time. It was capable of producing pineapples and figs, while les petits pois (garden peas) became the new food of the 17th century eagerly awaited each summer. However, the arrival of industrialized food in the late 1800s and early 1900s led to the establishment of completely different values. First, consistency of product became important with natural foods, like cheese for example, being selected and sold against a certain quality standard using the retailer’s name for authority (e.g. J.L. Kraft in Chicago and Fred Walker in Australia, both in 1903); as product trials generated repeat purchases from satisfied customers, ‘retailer names’ became valuable ‘brand names’. Secondly, advances in science and technology led to development of new ways of processing existing foods (e.g. flaked cereal in 1906 by co-inventor W.H. Kellogg) or completely new raw ingredients and foods that had not been seen before (e.g. margarine in 1878, first commercially produced by Unilever). The era also saw the birth of many of the great food companies known today and the great brands they sell. This industrialization was first led by increased scientific understanding, inventions, and great product development, which brought with it the development of our profession, Food Science and Technology. Excellent examples can be seen in the scientific approaches of these great food companies across the world. As time passed it was realized that development of ways to measure and quantify the hedonic or pleasurable aspects of food was needed, and the sensorial sciences developed slowly to meet this need. Several important milestones in this domain laid down the fundamental tools used today and some should be mentioned, such as the nine-point hedonic scale for consumer assessment (Jones et al., 1955; Peyram et al., 1957), the graphic line scale (Anderson, 1970), and the development of quantitative descriptive sensory analysis (Stone and Sidel, 1974). Initially this work often involved calculations done by hand, or as later done, with mainframe computers and programming in FORTRAN on