Everything You Need To Know About Food Product Development

Food Product Development

Let us start by knowing a little about product development-  Have you ever wondered how grocery stores and food services always have new things? Or what is the process of creating, processing, and commercializing food product development?

Well, this process generally requires a group of people who are habitual of working together to either develop or improve a product.

There are various key stages of food product development and those are—

  • Ideation
  • Formulation
  • Processing
  • Commercialization

These stages consist of checkpoints to decide whether to continue the project or not. There is a stage and gate system to carry out these projects that help in the development of new food products by strategically and wisely using the resources. Let us cover one by one these stages to understand the development of a new product.

Ideation

Getting an initial idea is the most difficult part of the development of a food product. Many various food products are available in the market so it requires a great deal to come up with an idea for a new one. When you start generating ideas for new products, various food and beverage design consultants start working together to implement those ideas.

After the generation of ideas, it is important to find the target customers. The main issue with ideation is regional vs. global preferences and market size vs. target market.  Let us take an example- if people like a certain flavor in the Midwest, people in other parts of the country may not like it. Same way if your target market is small of a product category along with the product category this means that market share is also not enough for the product.

It is quite challenging to understand that others may not like what you do. So you must produce something for the target audience excluding yourself.

Formulation

Formulation for food product development involves following steps—

Manufacturing New Product

  • On a small laboratory scale, obtain ingredients and start making the product
  • Start producing a “gold standard” of the new product

Related Issues

  • Cost of ingredients, and sourcing ingredients
  • Shelf life of a product (this usually is not tested in formulation, but it needs to be included in the process)
  • Can a product be manufactured on a large scale?
  • Always avoid copyright and patent infringement

Processing

  • To produce greater volumes the formulated product process is “scaled up”
  • It happens more often when the process is scaled up to more than once- Pilot plant testing, Plant testing.
  • With scale-up comes product changes
  • To set specifications, make sure of the food safety and estimate the shelf life it is essential to test the quality and proximate analysis
  • To determine the accurate product cost it is necessary to process experiments and runs

Key Question Of Processing

 How does the process affect the product attributes?

  • Shelf life
  • Overall functionality
  • Product specifications
  • Nutritional profile
  • Sensory attributes

Commercialization

  • Once the successful manufacture of a new product has been done, it is sent into the store for sale.
  • Included steps are – Determining the packaging, Creating a label, Finalizing the cost, Planning how to advertise the product.

After The Successful Launch Of A New Product

  • Determining that the product was successful
  • Measure the success of the product by- Market share, Company sales revenue, Growing interest, increase in sales.

Conclusion

 It is indeed a big step to launch a new product in the market that is different from any other. It is important to ideate openly with creativity. Before launching a food product developer plays an important role by testing the prototype of the product before the launch and also by letting know about the required changes in that product.