7 Questions To Ask Before You Start Mixing

It’s easy to lose sight of your goals during the new product development process. To stay focused, consider these questions and refer back to your answers as you move forward. It will help you create a great organic product that meets the taste needs of target consumers and the financial goals of the company.

What is it going to be? Create a written description of the
product you envision and refer back to it every time you make changes to your formula.

Who is the target market? Different market segments have very different tastes and are attracted by certain key elements of a product or package. Identifying your target audience and the trends that it is drawn to will help you shape your flavor and texture expectations, as well as the package graphics and portion size of the product.

What should it cost? This is the most important question. You can develop a phenomenal product but if it costs too much to make you’ll bankrupt yourself bringing it to market. Set a
target price and calculate your ingredients and production costs to be sure you stay within profitable parameters. A simple equation to calculate the rough formula cost of a product is:
Each Ingredient x Percentage of the Formula = Cost.

How organic is it going to be? A 100 percent organic product formula has a lot more limits than the “certified organic” or “made with organic” product label claims. You need to know up front what your organic goal is before you start formulating the product or sourcing ingredients.

What are the health claims? Besides being organic, you may want your product made with whole grains, or be low fat, or high in protein. “There is nothing worse than developing a great cookie only to find out it’s too high fat to meet your health claims,” says Sharon Herzog, director of research and development for Country Choice Organic, maker of a broad line of organic cookies, cereal bars and oatmeal, based in Eden Prairie, MN.
Whenever you tweak the formula or add a new ingredient, measure its impact on the health claims of the formula. She uses an off-the-shelf nutritional database program to run
nutritional facts on every formula she produces.

What is the timeline? It’s easy to get so caught up in batch testing that you never make it to market, so you have to create limits. Set a goal date to have a formula in place and be ready to move ahead or cut your losses at that time.

Where are you going to make it? If it’s a commercial product you need to have a facility to accommodate a 2,000-lb. batch of the product, and be sure the formula translates to large-scale production. When making that transition remember to factor in how long product will have to sit between processing steps and whether that will impact taste, texture or food safety attributes.