ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an integrated approach to new product design, beginning with the study of consumer demands, moving on to concept development and creating databases, and finishing with product design. It presents a synthesis of approaches that meld together traditional sensory evaluation, consumer research, product optimization, and marketing. Folk wisdom in the food business holds that a vast majority of food products introduced by a company will fail in the marketplace even though many of these introductions have enjoyed some level of research and are being introduced with the power of knowledge behind them. Consumers are notoriously fickle about the products they select; they become bored with products; their sensory systems pick up discrepancies between what a product promises versus what it delivers, and pick up sensory signals about product quality. The growing competition in the food and beverage industry has catapulted the consumer to new levels of influence.
