Impedance based electronic tongue applied for sensory profiling of black tea with sweeteners

The inherent complexities of sensory analysis necessitate technologies such as electronic tongues to support product development. This study employs an impedimetric electronic tongue to characterize sweetened black tea and evaluate its agreement with human sensory perception. Black tea exhibits a sensory matrix in which bitterness strongly interferes with sucrose perception, complicating panel-based quantification. Consumer testing shows that all sucrose concentrations tested (2.5–12 g/100 mL) fall within the ideal sweetness range for approximately 40% of assessors. Temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) confirms that bitterness dominates between 4–60 s, delaying sweetness perception until sucrose concentrations reach ≥10%. Trained panelists identify 7.5% sucrose as the ideal reference, enabling sucrose-equivalence calculations that reveal marked potency differences among sweeteners (e.g., sucralose 522-fold, neotame 5796-fold more potent than sucrose). The electronic tongue effectively discriminates majority of the sweeteners, with PCA of the optimized sensor configuration explaining 99.98% of total variance and the bare sensor achieving the highest silhouette value (0.87), indicating clear clustering. Regression models yield high linearity (R² > 0.96) and detection limits of 2.00–2.12 g/L for sweetener quantification. While classification accuracy is limited by imbalanced intensity classes (overall accuracy = 58%), the system reflects the sensory dominance patterns observed in TDS. Overall, the impedimetric electronic tongue provides reproducible, quantitative measurements that complement sensory analysis and offer a cost-efficient tool for evaluating sweeteners in complex, bitterness-dominated beverages. • E-tongue with gold and silver nano-particles for sweetener quantification. • Impedimetric e-tongue analyzed patterns from temporal dominance of sensation. • QDA demonstrated sucralose-stevia blend was ideal to replace sucrose in black tea.