Fuzzy Logic in Determination of Sensory Characteristics of Freeze-Dried Yoghurts with Fruit Fillers

Yoghurts are traditionally a standard food for all levels of consumers. However, the current economic situation requires increased attractiveness of products, for example, through the use of enriching fruit and vegetable additives. The choice of quantitative ratios of additives is a complex task to be solved mainly by using organoleptic estimations. The paper presents specific recommendations for the development of freeze-dried yogurt formulations, which have the application potential in industrial production. The results section contains examples of applying methods of fuzzy logic to authenticate sensory properties of yoghurts with fruit purees. During degustation there were tasters whose tasting assessment introduced their specific personal opinion into the overall result. To identify and remove "incompetent", not interested, biased tasters or tasterswith lowtaste sensitivity from the group, an information technology for expert processing of sensory assessments has been developed. The applied method made it possible to evaluate the quality of the product in the form of a heuristic fuzzy measure of similarity of the experimental and control samples. The results corresponded to the objective assessment and had good distinguishing ability. The method of fuzzy logic is convenient and quite simple to use, at the same time it allows one to obtain unbiased and reliable findings for choosing recipes. Important is the possibility in principle to use this method to evaluate not only organoleptic indicators, but also a wide range of technological properties, to find a rational balance of consumer properties and technological capabilities for each specific production.