(TDB) - It’s official: women are naturally better tasters than men according to Dr Deborah Parker, beer sommelier and associate director at UK sensory research specialists Marketing Sciences.

Speaking to the drinks business last week at the company’s Sensory Science Testing and Research Centre in Kent, Parker said that the firm’s team of sensory panellists were all women.

The people chosen to assess food and drink products at Marketing Sciences are selected after an initial test, which sees whether they can differentiate between five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

Parker recorded, “Only 10%-15% of the population have the sensory acuity to be a sensory taste panellist… and when we give consumers a sensory test, women always do better.”

However, she added that after both sexes have been through Marketing Sciences sensory training programme, “men and women perform the same”.

When asked why women might have a superior natural ability to differentiate between the basic tastes, Parker suggested it could be connected to mothering.

“Women are better discriminators, and that’s perhaps because mothers are always smelling and testing things before giving them to their children, they have an inherent ability to screen food and drink,” she said.

Nevertheless, she stressed that when it comes to the work at Marketing Sciences, it was the “training that is key, rather than the gender of the panellists.”

Interestingly, in a different exercise at the research centre, it was shown that artificial sweeteners are more bitter than the natural sucrose they are designed to replicate.

After a blind tasting of different sweetened waters, it was apparent that the liquid containing natural sugar had more sweetness and depth than the one containing Aspartame, Stevia or Saccharin, which appeared to have a thinner and more bitter character.