Developing index for favorite water

Abstract

Many studies have focused on producing safe drinking water for more than 100 years. However, these efforts were unable to satisfy consumers’ needs in the marketplace because of consumer interest in taste of water. Therefore, there is a need to shift paradigm. Hashimoto (1987) proposed O-index as an index of tasty water, which was made by a comparison between water samples in sensory test and mineral content. If the number of O-index of a water sample is larger than 2, it is regarded as tasty water. Nevertheless, the order of tasty water calculated by O-index was different from the result of water samples in sensory test, because O-index passed over different effects to water taste by mineral species. For that reason, this research proposed modified O-index, which aimed at solving this problem by using transformed t-value to standardize data. It was found that modified O-index was highly suitable to analyze natural spring water in Korea by application Modified O-index to mineral contents of water samples from Korea. There is a need to develop an index of water which can help to analyze tastes of consumers because consumers have very different preferences and tastes. It could be able to manufacture drinking water suitable for consumers’ tastes. Hence, this research also proposed an Index for Favorite Water (IFW) which consists of descriptors resulted by discussions with special panels.