[00:00.1]
Welcome to another episode of my 30 day podcast challenge. Today we are going to deep dive into a topic that is very often overlooked in the food and drink tasting and especially why tasting is so important and how to avoid rubbish tasting sessions that are literally useless for the product development and transform them into a great source of specific data that you can use again and again even after your product launched.
[00:28.2]
I know where you're going to say, "yes, we know tasting is very important because it helps us decide which product to go forward to", etc. Etc. I know you know you are a food and drink business, I know you know how tasting is important, but it's a little bit more than that.
[00:45.9]
I want you to avoid the pitfalls I see so many times with my clients of having tasting that are based on preferences rather than scientific, accurate, objective data.
[01:01.8]
Okay, we're going to focus on that today. The first reason why tasting is so important is to check unpleasant taste or flavours such as earthy, bitter and fishy. And for you out there who are creating a functional plant based type of product, you know how this is a big, big challenge.
[01:27.4]
I worked on a vegan omega 3 recently for one of my clients and the fishy notes were so strong and so difficult to overcome that it took me, it's still taking me, I haven't finished with this project, still taking me about 50, about 50 trials still ongoing to be able to mask this, this fishy note.
[01:50.2]
So the first thing why is important of tasting is to recognize the unpleasant notes. The second thing is to identify and create a unique flavour blueprint. So for example, it's not just about a strawberry, a vanilla, a chicken flavour or chocolate flavour.
[02:10.4]
What type of strawberry? Chocolate? What type of flavour? Is it creamy? Is it jammy? Is it floral? Is it green? I'm going to use this reference a lot. So it's more like cut grass or a green tomato is creating the characteristic of this flavour which will be unique to your product.
[02:33.2]
For that, as I always say, the flavours has to fit your product and your target consumers and that's going to give you a competitive edge. If all of the tastings are based on personal preferences and the only comments in the room I have is "oh, it doesn't taste really nice" or "oh, I really love it", what sort of tweak do you expect to do after that?
[02:58.7]
Either positive or negative, but especially the negative one, if someone say, oh, it doesn't taste nice, it tastes disgusting on this or this or this. It's just like something has to come out of this tasting, it's not just disregarding everything. Can we take what we already have and make it better?
[03:17.2]
And how do you want to tweak something if you have absolutely no data except it doesn't taste nice? Okay, what do you want me to do with that? So liking and personal preferences don't matter in this tasting.
[03:34.6]
What we have to do instead in this tasting is to focus on describing the the flavours. Is it sweet? Is it bitter? How sweet? How bitter? Is it strong? Is it weak? Is it balanced? Is it unbalanced?
[03:51.0]
How is the aftertaste? How is the strawberry? How are the fruity notes describing? As much as possible, at least first. Then we can step back and decide. Okay, based on all of the comments, you know your product, you know your target consumers.
[04:09.8]
What do you want to do after? Which product do you want to take forward? Which one do you want to discard? Which one do you want to tweak and improve? And this process is very important because it has to remove the personal.
[04:25.5]
It has to be as much as objective as possible. You have to think as the target consumers. If you like it or not, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Most of the time, when I see my client, they always ask me, "what do you think?"
[04:42.0]
And I never answer that question because I always say, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not here to tell you what I think. I'm just guiding you for you to take the decision based on your target consumers. Even if the CEO or the founder of the business doesn't like it, it doesn't matter if everyone in their target audience and their target consumers like it.
[05:06.2]
If the sales are going through the roof, that is important. If the repeat purchase is constant, that is important. So the purpose of this tasting, accurate and objective testing, is to create this unique flavour blueprint for each of your product, is also to understand consumer feedback and then tweak until your target consumer audience is happy with the product and they keep on buying again and again and again.
[05:38.6]
We are not trying to create a universally liked product. We focus on what the target consumers want. And the third main thing that the tasting do and why it's important is to check consistency.
[05:56.2]
Again, if the only data you have when you're in the product development stage is, "oh, yeah, it tastes nice". When you're gonna scale up your product, you always have to think ahead. When you're gonna scale up your product, when you're gonna have consumer feedback, when you're gonna have to deal with shelf life testing, that's the only data you have.
[06:21.4]
Yes, you can taste with the accurate the product itself but you have nothing else. Is it not easier to have the flavor blueprint and think okay, it's supposed to taste like this and this and this and this. I taste the benchmark product, I test the other one.
[06:37.5]
There's something that is missing or not missing. So it's good for consistency from the kitchen sample to the production because we know it always will have an impact, especially on flavor but also from batch to batch and over shelf life.
[06:53.9]
Okay, this is the end of this short and snappy episode. I hope it was helpful. Let me know in the comment of the episode and I will put a little bit more in my new newsletter that will come forward. So if you want more details around tasting, go and check the newsletter.
[07:13.3]
Thank you and I will see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
