Working as a panel leader, sensory scientist, and sensometrician for a combined almost 5 decades gives you some interesting stories and insights about the uses and exploits of sensory testing. Through in-depth interviews with experienced practitioners in the field – both sensory and non-sensory – come with us for a trip down the rabbit hole of all kinds of ways in which sensory testing can get garbled. Qualitative in-depth interviews were carried out with experienced practitioners from various departments and functions (i.e., marketing, sales, sensory). The following themes were discussed: (1) familiarity towards sensory methods, (2) interpretation of sensory profiling data, and (3) expectations on sensory testing and evaluation. The qualitative dataset was then subjected to thematic analysis process complemented with natural language processing technique (e.g., Reinert’s textual classification) to automate feature analysis that allows systematical quantitative analysis of qualitative data. The main themes identified in these interviews are: expectative confirmatory bias (e.g. – expecting that descriptive analysis will explain a failed a consumer test), resource avoidance (e.g. – trying to conduct a hedonic test with sensory panelists), absence of basic statistical understanding (e.g. not understanding that PCA axis labels change with the dataset, “cherry picking” results from analysis and only using the ones that agree with your bias),lack of trust (e.g. - Forcing a double-blind procedure with the Sensory personnel running a test to make the results ‘more real’), unrealistic assumptions towards sensory panel (e.g. - expecting the same results with different panels, sample-set, and methods), and sensory vocabulary mish-mash (e.g.- using consumer vocabulary in a sensory evaluation with trained expert panelists). Results highlight the common fallacies for non-sensory practitioners and day-to-day challenges that sensory and consumer practitioners face. We hope that this study brings awareness to the wider sensory/consumer science communities to find solutions towards these pressing challenges. Speakers: Kevin Kantono, PhD, Erin Riddell