Experts sample 900 batches each year to judge on appearance, smell and taste

Rice tasting is both an art and a science for Zhu Zhiwei and his team at the China National Rice Research Institute.

It's a complicated process, and the procedure for tasting a single sample of cooked rice takes about three hours. As the chief rice tasting analyst, Zhu scrutinizes about 900 samples of cooked rice each year.