**3. New Sensory Methods**

During the past decades, efforts have been put into developing new methodologies for sensory characterization of food with the aim of gaining speed and simplicity in relation to the traditional ones (Table 1). These new techniques try to provide complete information in innovation and product development and in proper approach of their marketing campaigns, to ensure success. These new alternatives have been categorized into three types depending on the nature of the evaluation task assigned to the panellists [17]:

#### *3.1. Methods Based on Written Descriptions of the Products*

Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) is a method that traditionally has been used with trained assessors, however, its use has recently become popular for food products' sensory analysis with consumers. CATA is a versatile multiple-choice questionnaire where different options of words or sentences are shown for the panellists to give their free opinion of without any type of limitation [18]. Consumers could use terms related with sensory attributes, hedonic responses, or other non-sensory properties such as: When are the products consumed? In which situation and atmosphere? What are the emotions or feelings while consuming? etc. One important thing to consider in this analysis is that the attributes are chosen by the consumer.

Flash Profiling (FP) is a method that in the first step develops the descriptive terms together with the participants and on a second step uses these descriptive terms to rank (e.g., from low to high, or least to most, etc.) the tasted products. Panellists are forced to generate discriminative attributes of the whole sample set, which is more important than the individual attributes of the products. This test allows combining free-choice profiling with a comparative evaluation of the set of products [19]. The number of needed panellists will depend on the objective and dissimilarities among the products. Even though panellists could be untrained, there is a need for at least familiarisation with the products. That is why semi-trained panellists are recommended. Moreover, FP can be more discriminating than conventional profiling for similar product categories [19]. Some limitations of FP are the need of presenting all the products at the same time and the difficulties when trying to compare results from this methodology and more traditional ones. FP is considered one of the more agile and malleable sensory methodologies to characterise food products.

Rate-All-That-Apply (RATA) is a type of CATA that is based querying consumers to classify the level of strength of descriptors that are applicable for defining/labelling samples [20]. This test has an increased ability to differentiate between samples which have a similar sensory response in terms of attributes, and is able to differentiate them based on the intensity of that response [21]. Although RATA has been tested on a different range of products, methodological studies on their reliability are still limited [20].
