Applications of Experimental Design in Consumer Science – 12 and 13 December 2023 @ 1400 (GMT)

What you will learn from this course

This one day workshop covers the approaches to product optimisation which control the recipes/processing variables tested with the aim of giving clear guidance on the key drivers of sensory/consumer responses. We will  start with simple factorial designs using case studies to emphasise the importance of  identifying and interpreting interactions between factors and then extend to more complex designs for optimisation of ingredients, processing or packaging.

You will learn how to interpret the models fitted and the visualisations of the experimental effects. There are many different software tools which help with this, creating the experimental sample designs and providing graphical analysis to aid interpretation of the results. We will use XLSTAT but will discuss other software packages (Design Expert, JMP, MINITAB). There will be opportunities for you to use any of the above softwares to design and analyse product sets for consumer/sensory test.

Course Outline

• Motivation for use of structured sample designs.
• Finding the key influences on consumer liking and sensory characteristics and uncovering interactions between ingredients and process parameters using factorial experiments
• Using these key parameters to plan further studies to optimise acceptability by applying response surface designs
• Recipe and formulation investigation using mixture designs.
• Visualisation of the response surfaces, simultaneous optimisation of several performance measures including cost.

Module 1 (12th December @ 1400h GMT/UTC)

• Motivation for use of structured sample designs.
• Factorial designs, model fitting, interpretation of interactions, graphical interpretation of effects
• How to deal with lots of factors in the same experiment using D-Optimal designs.

Module 2 (13th December @ 1400h GMT/UTC) 

• Response surface designs for measured factors: Central Composite and Box Behnken
• Model fitting and visualisations using contour plots
• Joint optimisation of several measures including cost and quality, desirability measures
• Mixture designs for recipe and formulation characterisation

Software
In order to be able to run the workshop exercises included in the course you will need  XLSTAT with the Experimental Design module or  one of the following: Design Expert, MINITAB or SAS JMP.

Timing

Each module is 3 ½ hours long  (please allow extra time for any connectivity issues at the start and questions at the end.

Please check your time zones to make sure the timings are suitable for your country)