Consumers driven innovation process for rapid design and development of new food products

Mohannad Jreissat*
University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan*

Abstract: A big challenge in the food industry is to introducing new food products or reformulating existing ones rapidly without comprising the quality of product itself. Once having future trends and innovative food products to marketplaces, very high rates of the failure of introduced products will reduce to minimum percentages and respond quickly to different market segments. New product development process is more complex, time consuming and risky than ever before due to heterogeneous individuals' preferences and short product lifecycle. Consumers’ interaction and understanding their requirements are a vital factor to streamline new product innovation process. The customer as co-creator of products is a grand challenge facing the entire consumer products industry. This paper presents consumer driven framework for rapid design and optimisation of new formulated products with desirable quality attributes on demand to meet the current consumer needs and desires. The framework is driven by different groups of consumers to interact directly in the product design process in terms of their consumer likings. Then, these likings are accurately translated into the production process design to project into a novel manufacturing process platform rapidly and concurrently. A target product of the case study is liquid formulations and in particular on food-grade orange flavoured beverages.

Keywords: New product innovation, Mass customisation, products design and development.