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A Sweet Science

By Angelique Sieniawski

Chocolate candy bars, fresh peanuts and almonds, cocoa beans, watermelon-flavored candy. Sound tasty? Donna Zeller gets paid to taste treats like these every day. As a sensory scientist for Hershey Foods, Zeller doesn't just taste chocolate. She plans tasting meetings, studies test results and trains others to taste ingredients.

"Chocolate is a complex flavor," says Zeller, 50, who has worked at Hershey for 13 years. "We make sure that a Hershey chocolate bar remains consistent over time." That's not easy because some ingredients, such as peanuts, can differ in taste from season to season.

To pick the perfect ingredients, the tasters need a keen sense of both smell and taste. Taste receptors on the tongue allow us to distinguish four basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. "Everything else is a combination of smelling and tasting," explains Zeller. Want proof? Mix some sugar and cinnamon. Hold your nose and taste the mixture. You taste the sweet sugar. Now let go of your nostrils, and your sense of smell helps you taste the cinnamon. "Tasting is a science," says Zeller, who studied biology in college.

Believe it or not, tasters never get too full. The key to tasting is spitting out. "If you ate everything, you'd be sick!" says Zeller. "We carry spit cups with us."

At many food companies, employees and volunteers do the tasting, but at Ralston Purina, pets are the tasters! The company relies on more than 1,000 cats and dogs to taste-test its pet foods.

Would Zeller switch from chocolate tasting to pet-food tasting if she could make twice as much money? No, thanks, she says. "I'd much rather taste chocolate."

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