Getting Paid to Taste Food

I've worked in the restaurant business for a lot of years in many different capacities. I've been a cook, a restaurant manager, and a marketing manager. I've written the corporate newsletter, been a mystery shopper, and written many restaurant reviews in my day. I've also been in focus groups and sampled restaurant food and given my opinion on it.

If you have a good sense of taste or smell, you can get a good job just sampling things and then giving your opinion of them. One of the most bizarre jobs in this field is the people who have sensitive noses and test underarm deodorant.

National Geographic once showed a person with their nose buried in a test subject's underarm seeing if they can detect body order after the test subject has used the deodorant. I'm not sure which would be more embarrassing: getting my pit sniffed or doing the sniffing.

There are other folks that make their living doing this sort of thing as well. One that comes to mind is wine tasting. Those with a discerning palate can make good money tasting wine and beer.

Food labs also employ test subjects and professionals to determine if they should put a new food on the menu. Sometimes the test subjects aren't even paid. It is said that McDonald's rubs French fries in the mouths of babies and then looks at their facial response.

According to the St. Louis Post dispatch:

"Their environment is totally controlled. No windows face the outside world. The air is pressurized to keep smells out, and the lights cast an even, featureless glow. The room suffers no art or motivational posters, no music, no television chatter.

The people in the room are called the "sensory staff." They are focused on tasting and sniffing all kinds of products that if they approve, will be sent all over the world. These tasters are so well-trained that they can tell the nuances between different shades of green from "grassy" to "fresh cut." And the mechanized and industrialized food industry depends on their ability to taste. They are literally getting paid to taste stuff. What a cushy job.

Companies use two different kinds of tasters: One are the professionals. They can give a detailed report about the food that only the food scientists can understand. Then, the food is paraded out to a number of focus groups. They give a more generalized "average Joe" review of the product.

They are the human element in this otherwise automated industry. In the end, all of the data from both the scientists, expert food tasters, and the average Joe's are put together to determine whether a food product is going to be successful or not. Rarely do they make a mistake.

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_5fe1a780-f782-5f5f-bd6e-72b4b13f87f8.html