How to Be a Professional Food Taster

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Whether your palate prefers champagne and caviar or a simple cheeseburger and fries, those superpowered taste buds can help steer you into a fun, food-tasting career.

Step 1: Live a clean lifestyle
Live a lifestyle that protects your senses of taste and smell. Eschew smoking and drinking. Also avoid scarring your palate with extremely spicy or salty foods.

Tip
Since 80 percent of taste is smell, keep in mind that aftershave or cologne can also impact a food's taste.

Step 2: Attend a culinary school
Attend a culinary school to refine your palate and learn all you can about the taste, texture and flavor of different foods. Many universities also have food science programs if your kitchen skills are less than spectacular.

Step 3: Get real life training
Work with the food you would like to taste for a living. Get a job at a coffee plantation, a chocolate shop, or a bakery to learn all you can about the process, flavors, and subtleties of a specific food.

Step 4: Learn to love different foods
Learn to love all kinds of foods from seafood to rare fruits and vegetables, to basic salty and sweet snack foods. A freelance taster may be called to compare all kinds of different products.

Tip
Some people's sense of taste is more adept at detecting either sweet or savory so discover where you talent lies.

Step 5: Pursue a nutrition degree
Pursue a nutrition degree and then find an internship that covers quality control. Again, learn all you can about the product and process to eventually ascend to the ranks of a professional taster.

Step 6: Work in product development
Find a position in product development at a snack company. With hard work and patience, you'll soon be creating and sampling new and interesting products almost everyday.

Did You Know?
Humans are born with about 10,000 taste buds.