From a practical standpoint, it is often desirable for a consumer products company to be able to conduct preliminary acceptance testing with an in-house panel made up of company employees. While results from this type of panel should never be used as a basis for final consumer product decisions, they are useful in the early stages of the product development cycle to predict which formulations are most likely to be successful in further testing or to predict consumer responses to such issues as shelf life expiration based on acceptance. Before these panels can be used with confidence, however, it is necessary to establish an understanding of the true predictive nature of in-house panels when compared to actual consumer responses for the product category of interest.