Accelerating New Food Product Design & Development

To compete in today's marketplace, food product developers are under pressure to create innovative new products at a time when there are demands to cut back on development costs, labor, and other problem solving tools. In Accelerating and Optimizing New Food Product Design and Development, a group of seasoned food industry business professionals show today's food scientists, technologists, and product developers the contemporary R&D processes they need to maximize speed, quality, and efficiency. The book is organized into three parts to make reading and referencing easy. Part one, "Understanding Product Development in Today's Food Industry," provides an anchoring as to what is actually happening in the food business today and how marketers, business designers, newer professionals and more seasoned workers and managers are coping. Part two, "Accelerating Food Product Design and Development," describes what has changed in the world of marketing and selling foods to consumers so that practitioners can develop faster, better approaches for creating those products. Specific processes and techniques are presented for developing improved systems for creating product ideas, consumer evaluation of concepts, and identifying greater opportunities for success. Critical steps in the new product development process are explored so that scientists and developers can effectively speed up their development activities. Part three, "Optimizing Food Product Design and Development," gives a practical overview of the most important tools and approaches that food designers and developers are using to make products better, cheaper, and faster. Approaches that are described include criteria to use for the development of the product design brief, proper experimental designs that yield the most optimized solutions for product development, factors that must be included in any optimizing study, how discriminant and logistic regression analysis can drive more consumer focus during product optimization, where response surface methods fit into the product development process today, and how simulations of operations are producing better designed products and processes more rapidly and completely. Accelerating and Optimizing New Food Product Design and Development is of value to a number of audiences. For food industry executives, it offers a summary of perspectives of the business they are in from unique viewpoints. Academics and students gain a real world perspective of what is occurring in the food industry at the beginning of the 21st Century. And for practicing food scientists and allied professionals, the book provides strategic frameworks for problem solving and the contemporary R&D strategies, processes, and methods needed to maximize speed, quality, and efficiency.