Something for the weekend: The Centre for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the US has begun searching for a descriptive sensory panellist to taste cheese, pizza and other dairy products.
Successful applicants for this un-brie-lievable opportunity will be passionate about all types of foods, but especially cheese, pizza and dairy products. Those wanting to apply do not need any particular cheese tasting qualifications, but previous sensory panellist experience is preferred.
The university will provide training to become part of a group of expert tasters who are feta than the rest at verbally describing their sensory experience on the basis of appearance, texture, taste and aroma attributes for research and product development purposes.
The winning taster will try up to 24 cheese samples and 12 pizzas a week, along with other food products. They will need to be available for three sessions a week lasting for a period of three consecutive hours. The salary is a gouda one too, at $15 (£11.77) per hour.
The cheesy responsibilities include describing a range of food products in terms of appearance, texture, aroma and flavour, recognising and learning these attributes and evaluating them accurately and reliably using prescribed scales and scale references, participating in descriptive panel discussions describing product attributes, definitions, creation of scales and reference anchoring, and being responsible for accurately entering scoring data into electronic ballots.
Other requirements include accurately following instructions on sample evaluation, use of scale and ballot completion given by the descriptive panel leader, attending all training discussions given for each product area to ensure continued understanding of product attributes and scale references, and participating in panellist performance monitoring studies, bi-annual taste acuity rescreening and subsequent retraining when necessary to ensure consistent performance in attribute evaluation.
This sounds like a grate opportunity to us here at Employee Benefits, it doesn’t get any cheddar than this!