Future and trends in food industry product development

Introduction

​Successful innovation is key for growth and competition in food industry. When ca 80% of new food and beverage products fail within the first year in markets, sensory properties of food and beverage produces are increasingly important. In addition to successful marketing, products must be liked and preferred by consumers to establish market success and repeat purchases. This is a brief overview about some of the most interesting new developments and ideas in the field of new food development.

Trends and future

​Machine learning

​Machine learning, deep learning, AI, these are all the buzzwords common to high tech industry. For some time now these complex techniques have found their way into the food industry. A startup called IntelligentX Brewing Co. in London http://intelligentx.ai/ uses an AI as a master brewer.Their idea is that consumers give feedback about the beer and this information is used in next batch to produce (hopefully) better beer. 

Neuromarketing

Traditionally, consumers are asked their opinions, feelings and preferences regarding brands and products. 95% of our thoughts are subconscious and defined by “old brain”. Person cannot describe the feelings and decisions adequately. This is where neuromarketing comes to help. Neuromarketing also relies on different techniques that help to reveal hidden emotions such as computerized eye tracking, brain measurements, using facial recognition to detect emotions. If you are interested in learning more about the neuromarketing check out his online course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/neuromarketing

Eye tracking

Social Networks

Social networks allow companies to carry out rapid innovation directly with consumers. Crowdsourcing has been used successfully for new food products, menus, brands and advertising. For example: one of the most innovative food production company in Estonia, Põltsamaa Felix is involving consumers to design a new ketchup bottle label and running parallel social media campaign with it. This has been viral in the local community. 

The finalists in user submitted label design

Direct feedback

One way to collect feedback about your restaurant and check the quality of day-to-day service and products is to use mystery shopping. But mystery shopping is very expensive and only gives you feedback per visit. Some companies have gone so far as to enable each of their customer to give feedback. One good example is Papa John, rolling out packaging for its takeaway pizzas featuring a QR code inviting customers to rate and comment the product using SMS via mobile.

If collecting instant feedback is something that would help you to learn more about your products, read more: http://www.esensorics.com/instant-feedback.html

New techniques

Projective mapping

Helps to gather similarity data in product category reviews for consumer or marketing research. Classically projective mapping is carried out on large piece of paper and the data collection can be quite time consuming. If you are interested in using projective mapping app that works on PC or tablets then contact us!

Projective Mapping and Sorting Tasks: https://www.utdallas.edu/~herve/abdi-cvna2014_sorting.pdf

Projective mapping with Nappl app by Esensorics

Preference mapping

​Can be used to understand the key attributes about the liking and how to optimize the sensory properties of product to move do desired position in the market. 

Consumer-Led Food Product Development ​http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9781845690724

Sorting

Enables to gather perceptual maps of product sets of interest. Can be used by trained or untrained assessors. Result is group-derived estimate of similarity.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SORTING, SIMILARITY SCALING AND FREE-CHOICE PROFILING OF GRAPE JELLIES  ​http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2002.tb00361.x/abstract

Flash analysis

​Used for getting the relative sensory properties of several products in a very short span of time.

Sensory mapping using Flash profile. Comparison with a conventional descriptive method for the evaluation of the flavour of fruit dairy products ​https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222362833_Sensory_mapping_using_Flash_profile_Comparison_with_a_conventional_descriptive_method_for_the_evaluation_of_the_flavour_of_fruit_dairy_products

Temporal dominance of sensations

​Reveals product perception patterns over time and allows getting the sequences of sensations.

Temporal dominance of sensations http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950329307000730