[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

Am I right in saying that in order to have an effective taste test you need it to be double-blinded? The contestants in this video are testing the taste and other aspects of the top-selling take-out grilled chickens served in sandwiches and wraps (the chicken only, not the bread, condiments, etc.) The food road testers can easily feed off the reactions of each other and the test-makers, and I think I'm seeing that in this video. Peer-pressure.

[Bored chemist]

"Should taste tests be double blinded?"
It depends; what are they for?

If it's to actually find out things then yes, they should be.
But if the point is to make an advert then double blinding them would be a really bad idea.

[alancalverd]

Your taste sensation is strongly influenced by ambience, hunger, temperature, presentation, texture, and what you last had in your mouth. Wine tasting with an independent Master of Wine can be very illuminating: A then B can be quite a different experience from B then A. A canny wine merchant may provide a strong cheese as a "palate cleanser" when offering reds, so that you end up buying expensive 15% paint stripper rather than a perfectly good 10% vin de table which now tastes like dishwater.

No need to watch the video - you can tell from the opening photo that the chicken is irrelevant: what you are comparing is salads, wraps, pickles, sesame seeds.... After all, the most damning comment on any chef d' oeuvre is "it tastes like chicken".

[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey (OP)]

Your taste sensation is strongly influenced by ambience, hunger, temperature, presentation, texture, and what you last had in your mouth.

Very true. They should have offered a palate cleanser between courses.