Shin Yejin, a master's student in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Jeonbuk National University (JBNU), is an avid enthusiast of mala-tang, which has become a trend among the MZ generation. She has such a strong preference for spicy food that she says she must maintain a certain level of 'mala' in her bloodstream.

One day while eating mala-tang, Shin suddenly wondered, "How can spiciness be objectified and scaled?"

As a student majoring in food and nutrition, this small everyday question was enough to ignite her determination to pursue research.

The methods for evaluating spiciness that she learned in her major rely entirely on instrumental analyses such as LC‑MS and HPLC. The spiciness of kimchi and gochujang is also graded in this way.

However, because these methods do not correspond to the actual intensity of spiciness perceived by humans, there arose a need to develop an objective method for people to directly evaluate spiciness in foods. That marked the beginning of the research.

Shin then approached the advisor of the JBNU Sensory Science Research Laboratory. After consulting with the advisor, she organized a panel of trained sensory evaluators to conduct intensity assessments, and submitted the results to the Korean Society of Food Science and Technology.

Through these intensity assessments, they found that perceived spiciness is not strongest immediately upon entering the mouth, but becomes more intense about 20 seconds after swallowing. This could be revealed because human evaluation covers areas that instrument‑based analytical methods could not detect.

These findings received favorable evaluation from the Korean Society of Food Science and Technology and earned an Outstanding Poster Award. The committee praised the work because simple quantification through instrumental analysis makes it difficult to secure objectivity in spiciness and therefore lacks reliability, and this study departed from the existing research paradigm by proposing a method for humans to objectively evaluate food.

Shin said, “I am very glad this gave me an opportunity to learn more about the spiciness of the foods I like.” She added, “I want to share the joy of this award with the trained panelists who participated in the spiciness intensity assessment, Professor Kim Mina Kyungmin, and the senior and junior members of the Sensory Science Research Laboratory.”