The appearance of a food product is one of the first things that impacts a consumer's opinion of overall quality; food manufacturers therefore seek to ensure their product is ideal and the same at each time of production. Instrumental tests are commonly conducted to understand physical properties of food products but are often too granular to truly understand what the consumer is experiencing. For example, if a milk powder looks atypical to a consumer, then the consumer tends to assume that the functionality and sensory aspects of the powder will be substandard. A method was needed in the commercial grading environment to measure and monitor the tendency of dairy powders to clump (clumpiness), which is the key visual aspect defining milk powders. This paper describes the development and validation of a set of photographic standards of the degree of clumpiness to be used by trained grading assessors.

食品的外观是影响消费者对整体质量看法的首要因素之一；因此，食品制造商力求确保他们的产品在每次生产时都是理想的和相同的。仪器测试通常用于了解食品的物理特性，但通常过于精细，无法真正了解消费者的体验。例如，如果一种奶粉对消费者来说看起来不典型，那么消费者往往会认为奶粉的功能和感官方面不合标准。在商业分级环境中需要一种方法来测量和监测乳粉结块（结块）的趋势，这是定义奶粉的关键视觉方面。