Not a promotion for Walkers
Eating crisps for a part-time living sounds like a joke but it’s 100% a real job, you thankfully will also probably get to test other food and drinks such as Tropicana orange juice, Doritos crisps, Naked Smoothies/Juices, Lipton Ice-tea, Quaker Oats So Simple, Pepsi Max, Copella Juices, Nobby’s Nuts, Gatorade and Snack a Jacks!
PepsiCo UK, the American company that owns Walkers, has a job opportunity that is rather tempting, “consume a wide variety of foods and beverages” at the pay rate of £8.51 an hour….
Krystina Mason, 6-year veteran super taster who works for the company told Leicester Mercury that:
“On a day-to-day basis we have to make sure our palates are clean – I like to drink lemon water,”
“We are not allowed to drink tea or coffee because it will interfere with the palate. We have to have 20 minute breaks between tests, where we will eat fruit so we know our taste buds are cleansed.
“My husband laughs at me because I go to particular lengths not to make spicy foods.
“I go to a lot of trouble to not have things interfere with my taste buds, so I know I am up to standard and nothing will interfere with my taste buds at work.”
(Photo YouTube / Geek Pride)
Do you match the criteria?
- Prepared to consume a wide variety of foods and beverages
- Can’t be colour blind
- Able to stop drinking Coffee or Tea Drinker
- A non-smoker
- Able to give good descriptions
- No food intolerances
- Have good odour recognition skills
- Heightened sense of taste so you can give strong feedback
- The ability to identify the basic tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami
- Be a team player
- Have good interpersonal, communication and computer skills.
Some examples of strange flavours Walkers have tested in the past
Matt Cullingworth, Walkers’ sensory expert said:
“The skills are quite niche. Only about one in four people have them.
“To recruit, we go through 40, 50, or 60 people to find 10. What we are looking for is someone who can identify the basic tastes – that is sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami (a savoury taste).
“We would also test how sensitive they are to these tastes.
“In addition, they have to do odour recognition – so they are given different odours to identify. They also have to be able to give good, targeted descriptions. Typically, we ask them to describe an apple.”
We’re are not looking for someone to call it “shiny and green”, they want them to break down in detail.
“We are looking for a description, like it has a brown mottled stalk, and to describe its shiny appearance and taste. We like people who can describe the eating journey.”
There are also colour tests – because we do a lot on the appearance of crisps.
There are a lot of things to take into account before we would take someone on as a super taster.”
Once you get the job, you then need to have your taste beds tested every three months to make sure they are still up to scratch.
“We have to control it to ensure we are providing data of the highest quality,”
You may also like:
- £48.50 Perfume Vs £1.99 Perfume: The Results + other cheap perfume knockoffs
- Wave goodbye to soggy crisps: Simple bag sealing trick
- Guy makes £6300 per month using a pen and some potatoes
(Photo: Twitter/VeryBritishProblems)
