Training Food Sensory Scientists for 18 years

Using their senses comes naturally to food scientists. From pinpointing the just-about-right creaminess of milk to offering fine-tuned flavour recognition – these are just a couple of sensory skills that food scientists bring to the job.

For the last 18 years, Dr. Margaret Cliff led the hands-on sensory training for graduate-level food science students at UBC – teaching them to meticulously fine-tune their senses while also developing their analytical and critical thinking abilities. She designed and taught Laboratory Methods in Sensory Evaluation (FOOD 529), and will soon hand the course over to a new instructor as she hangs up her lab coat for good this year.

“Sensory insights are important in the food and beverage industry – especially today as new products can see a failure rate between 70-90 per cent in the marketplace,” says Cliff, who served as Adjunct Professor in the Master of Food Science (MFS) Program.

She says students often came into her course feeling unsure about their skills in statistics, as well as their ability to discern different tastes, but she designed the curriculum to develop technically sound skills in a safe environment.

“I built their tasting skills using anonymous and blind taste tests,” she says. “In the first lab, they learned to distinguish one variable – and by the eighth lab, students were utilizing multivariate statistics to understand the relationships among the sensory attributes: appearance, aroma, taste, flavour, and texture.”

“Students were utilizing multivariate statistics to understand the relationships among the sensory attributes: appearance, aroma, taste, flavour, and texture.”

– Dr. Margaret Cliff

She wanted to ensure students would be prepared to work in industry or to pursue a career in research. 

“Their experience with statistical analysis and interpreting data can apply to any data set from any lab experiment. Also, I wanted to build their skills in both writing and presenting abstracts and executive summaries – it’s like they are writing a scientific paper, and they need to explain how their findings are relevant to the real world.”

Teaching wasn’t always in Cliff’s career plans. She is passionate about research and started her career in research in 1980 at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Summerland, B.C. An alumna (BSc Food Science ’80) of the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, then named Agricultural Sciences, Cliff later obtained an MSc from University of California, Davis (Viticulture and Enology), followed by a PhD from University of Missouri, Columbia (Food Science – Sensory Evaluation).

When UBC launched the MFS program in 2007, she came on board to develop the hands-on lab course. For 12 years, she continued working at both AAFC and UBC – taking a leave from AAFC to teach during winter semester, then returning to AAFC, often bringing with her an MFS student to complete their industry practicum (FOOD 531).

Cliff fully retired from AAFC in 2018, focusing solely on teaching and research at UBC.

As a Research Scientist, she published more than 100 papers and is proud of two publications in particular.

In 2014, she published a paper related to a new apple cultivar, called the ‘Salish™ Apple’, while working at AAFC. Her research team documented that this cultivar met or exceeded gold standard comparisons already in the marketplace – in this case other tart cultivars (McIntosh, Spartan, Granny Smith). To assist with identifying target markets, Cliff went to the public to gather consumer insights on its sensory characteristics using blind taste tests held at UBC Botanical Gardens during their apple festivals.

The other notable publication featured early-stage preference mapping of new apple selections – relying on both subjective consumer insights, as well as an objective flavour profile that was obtained in the sensory lab. The results of the 2015 paper in the Journal of Food Science and Agriculture supported the development of four new AAFC apple selections; her work provided integral insights prior to commercialization, a stage which is conducted by AAFC’s industry partner, the Summerland Varieties Corp.

Cliff’s expertise and passion have underpinned her teaching at UBC. She has received high acclaim and accolades from students and faculty members – establishing FOOD 529 as a keystone feature of the MFS program.

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