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If you're a food and drink brand and your product isn't performing the way it should, maybe the sales have slowed down or the review keep mentioning that the taste is not that great. I have created something to help you. It's called the Flavour Blueprint. It's a free guide that based on the process I use with my clients to fix their underperforming products.
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If you're tired of guessing and you want clarity before another batch, download your free flavour blueprint. If you want to create food or drink products that actually taste amazing, get the repeat purchases and see your sales go up.
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You need the flavour strategy. I'm Manon Galizzi, food scientist and flavour expert and in this podcast I share what I've learned from helping food and drink brands create new products from scratch. Choose the right flavour direction or fix the flavours that are not working. Welcome to another of my 30 days podcast challenge.
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I How do I validate my food or drink product before launch? That is a good question, isn't it? The first thing that I can tell you is one person should never approve the final product, whatever is a food and drink of your business.
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Not the CEO, not the founder, not the manager, not the director, we whatever title they are, I don't give a shit. Not one person should never approve the final food or drink product. And it's something that really trigger me in a way something that really pissed me off because I've worked in a big corporate food and drink company and I saw some of the project where a dozen of people are involved, multi skilled.
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It's been a year, we already done very expensive consumer testing approved by the consumers. The product is ready to launch. The project like I said has been done for a year ready to launch and the CEO alone tried the product doesn't like it.
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And just like that straight into the bin you go and back to square one. Why? What the hell? I mean what the hell that man. Why?
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Why whoever the titles they are not your target consumer. Most of sorry but most of this person not even know how to taste. They are not from R and D, they don't have a food background, science, they don't have a flavour experience.
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They literally don't know how to do a proper constructive tasting. And the only thing is basically I don't like it. That's it. You think you have a universal palette that represent all of your target consumers.
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Who cares? Who cares if the CEO, the founder, doesn't like it? What you have to focus as a food and drink Business is first of all, always focus on the objective and never on the personal preferences.
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I know it can be very difficult, especially for some founders. Where is their baby? Maybe it's a recipe that come from the family recipe that come from a grandma or mother or dad or granddad. So there is this personal attachment to your product.
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You are the one that created that food and drink business. You have created from scratch that product. So it is normal to have this emotional attachment to it. But you have to remember, who are you doing this product for?
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Are you doing it for yourself, for your own consumption? Are you doing it for your family or friends? Or are you doing it for thousands, even more thousands and thousands of your target consumers? I'm not saying every consumers in the uk.
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I'm saying target consumers. Okay, There is a difference. I don't think the founder should have a huge impact on the final decision of the product because it's not going to be objective.
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As a food and drink business owner, you, have to remove the emotional. You have to be much more analytical and objective in your product launch. This is the only way you're going to succeed.
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If you're not listening to your team, if you're not listening to your consumers, your product and potentially your business are going to fail. You have to adapt to your target consumers palette.
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You have to listen to critical feedback. I gave some constructive, not very pleasant, but constructive feedback when I was at the Bread and Jam Feel Good Summit. I know the name was feel good feedback, but I just thought this is my job, I do that for a living.
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I'm gonna give them constructive feedback so their product can be from great to amazing. And some of them took that constructive feedback very positively. One of, one of them even shook my hand of thank you so much. Thank you so much for telling me this.
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And some of that completely dismissed. While I said of basically you're just one opinion, I don't give a damn. I'm just thinking of your target consumers and what the retailers are going to say. That's one thing to be on shelf, it's another to staying there and staying there for a long time.
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You have to listen to your customers feedback or to the professional's feedback. So let's go back to our main question, how to validate my project before I launch. You have to rely on data and fact.
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The first thing that you have to ask your consumers or yourself is if the taste and the flavours is balanced and rounded. If there is a flavour, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, that overpower, then it's not going to be balanced.
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If your flavours say, for example lemon and lime, you have to be sure is balanced in a way where the consumers can taste both lemon and lime and there is no one of the flavour that overpower the other. The second question, does the flavour profile suit the product base?
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Most of the food and drink businesses I talk to always select the flavours according to marketing. What is on trend, what are the most popular flavours, and then they try the flavours into the product and of course it doesn't work because it's not as easy as that.
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So rather than focus on the marketing and what is on trend, what the more popular flavour focus on, does it actually fit my product? Can I really go for strawberry? Another question is, does the flavour profile fit your target consumers?
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Again, if your target consumers are Gen Z, they are adventurous, they are bored of all of the common flavours that are on shelf and there was something they want to travel through food, because maybe they don't have the money at the moment with everything that that happened in the past few years.
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So they want to travel through food rather than actually traveling because they don't have the money. Or are you targeting more women menopausal that want something that is light and sophisticated and floral?
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So you really have to nail your target consumers. What do they eat? What do they like, what social media content they are using, what delivery third party do they use, what sort of takeaway are they taking, where in London, are they traveling, where are they eating, what is their habit, what they have, what they have for breakfast, what they have for lunch, what snack do they have?
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Do they want to be healthy? Do they want to be greedy? Do they want to pick me up? Do they want protein? You have to understand everything about them to take that final decision. You may have for example, two flavours that fit your product, but which one would your target consumer prefer?
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You have to take into account the everything. And then once you go through your consumer tasting, understand their feedback to be able to tweak and you can ask some of your target consumers, it doesn't need to be through a very big expensive agency.
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You can take for example 20 or 30 of your consumers, send them your product for free, ask them for feedback, etc. Etc. I hope it makes a little bit more sense why one person should never be the center of this kind of decision.
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How he needs to be a team and he has to be consumer led. Okay, as always, I hope this episode was helpful. You can find all my tips around tasting flavours and project development in my newsletter, so don't forget to subscribe and I will see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
