[125] Although General Foods Corp. has had no direct contract responsibility in the NASA food development program, we accepted the invitation to participate in this conference because we felt that some of our experiences in the development of new food products might be of interest and bear some relevance to some of the aerospace feeding problems. Part of my message is well exemplified in the sentence, "The need for long lead time for future manned aerospace flights and world needs present and future is evident. " We might add two further needs which must always be a part of any food-product development program, namely, recognition of the voice of the consumer, and adequate funding to attain the objectives sought.
Before we become specific about food products let us review some facts relative to the food business and the relationship of new products to the vitality of a company. The food business is the largest business in the world, and quite logically so, since every individual needs, above everything else, food to sustain life. (In this context water is considered to be a food. ) An adequate food supply represents strength to the individual, strength to the ration, and strength to any endeavor involving man. In the United States alone the consumer food budget is over 100 billion dollars per year. Of this, 40 billion is in the fresh-food category (meats, milk, eggs, and vegetables), and 60 billion is in processed foods. About 22 billion dollars worth of the processed foods are perishable; the remaining 38 billion is for the shelf-stable processed foods. It is this last classification to which we will address ourselves primarily.
A viable, prosperous, growing food business requires constant new product development, product improvement, process development, and process improvement, and these efforts are supported by an expenditure in this country of over 400 million dollars per year in research and development. Satisfying the demands and needs of the consumer and maintaining growth in a food company requires a constant flow of new products. Fifty percent of the items on the supermarket shelf today were not there 10 years ago. The profitable and useful life of a new product follows the traditional curve shown in figure 1, from which it is evident that new products must be brought to - market continuously year after year to sustain company growth from new products.
Many new product needs come from the consumer. It is the consumer whose wishes and desires must be satisfied, and the development of a new product should always give a high priority to the voice of the consumer. These needs are then translated into new product ideas by the technical researcher. New product ideas may also originate with other personnel of a company such....
....as market researchers, salesmen, or purchasing personnel, or come from government laboratory research, university research, and consulting laboratories.
It is interesting that the most compelling reason for selection of a new food item by the consumer is the desire for variation and change, with convenience running a close second. These two considerations account for almost 50 percent of the reasons for choice of a new food item. Next come taste and flavor and then curiosity, which account for another 30 percent. Other reasons include "because it's new, " and expectation of good quality, price, better packaging, and free samples. Of interest is the fact that the consumer selects an item "to please the family" less than once in 200 selections of a new food product. Nutrition rarely ever shows as a reason; this means that the food company must build nutrition into its products as an incidental acceptability factor.
Because of the high mortality rate of new product ideas, many must be reviewed, evaluated, and sometimes reevaluated to produce one winner. On the average 60 new product ideas are needed to result in one successful marketable product. Of these 45 are lost in the preliminary screening, 8 more during concept testing, 4 in the intensive research and development stage, and 2 more at the test market stage, thereby leaving only 1 which reaches national distribution. Incidentally, about 40 percent of the total costs are consumed in research and development by the time the one product reaches a successful market distribution, a fact pointing up again the need for adequate R&D funding.
[127] Recent trends in new product development have been in the direction of technically designed foods, that is, foods specially fabricated to meet certain consumer demands, storagability requirements, packaging and transportability characteristics, etc. Instant banana pudding is an example of such a product; it applies the concepts of a highly popular flavor with convenience. An instant fruit-drink mix offers the consumer a shelf-stable, uniform, nutritious, acceptable fruit-flavored drink by the simple addition of cold water. Recent advances in freeze-dried products offer the consumer high flavor acceptability with the convenience of rapid rehydratability. For example, freezedried coffee resulted from over a dozen years of painstaking application of flavor technology with unique engineering processing techniques to attain the acceptable, marketable product; when instantly reconstituted it resembles as nearly as possible a freshly brewed cup of coffee and makes unnecessary the time-consuming bother of preparing the brew from roasted and ground coffee. These samples of technically designed products are just as acceptable, refreshing, and nutritious to the man in space as to the earthbound consumer and serve only as illustrations of the efforts made to meet the desires and demands of the consumer. Of high significance in the development of all technically designed foods is the opportunity offered for carefully controlled, high-quality standards in the product with precise uniformity day after day and year after year.
One category of technically designed foods receiving much attention recently is that of intermediate moisture products which must be shelf-stable, ready to eat, soft to the touch, moist to the bite, acceptable in flavor and texture, satisfying, nutritious, and packagable. Some items known to the consumer for many years which might be classified as intermediate moisture products are dried fruits, honey, and maple syrup. Even such a product as catsup, although in the higher moisture range, is stable by virtue of its high acidity and salt content. The soft, moist pet foods recently developed and now in the marketplace represent the application of modern technologies in the production of highly acceptable, nutritious foods for our pets. These same principles will soon manifest themselves in the development of human foods and should represent an ideal line of products for the astronaut.
Similar and closely related is the area of moisture mimetic product prototype development being pursued by General Foods Corp. along with the intermediate moisture investigations under partial support from the U. S. Army Natick Laboratories. It has been our objective to treat compressed bars of dehydrated foods in such a manner as to give the impression of moistness when eaten. It was therefore necessary to add certain materials which resembled moistness in the mouth yet retained a moisture content in the bar of less than about 2 percent. Selection of such additives must take into consideration flavor and acceptability along with nutrition, effect on appearance, bulk stability, and rehydration. In all cases it has been our aim to limit the additive content to 20 percent by weight of the bar, maintain a minimum calorie content of 4 Kcal/g, and obtain a compressed bar which is easily sheared by the incisors at temperatures between 30° and 100° F. In addition, this bar must be chewable without becoming crumbly or difficult to swallow, withstand dropping to a concrete floor from a height of 3 ft, and be rehydratable in hot or cold water within a 15-min period.
Examples of additives which simulate moistness are glycerol, honey solids, dextrose, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol, fats, and oils. In addition, many additives induce salivation, among [128] which are salts, fruit solids, and organic acids such as malic, citric, and tartaric. Invariably combinations of additives serve better than any one alone and the optimum combination will depend upon the particular food product under study. Obviously, combinations to be used for essentially meat items would differ from those for vegetables, cereals, fruits, dairy items, or mixed dishes. In all cases, however, it was found that to obtain best results certain of the salivation-inducing agents must be used along with the additives which simulate moistness. It was found that the moisture mimetic composition is best introduced into the compressed dehydrated or, frequently, freeze-dehydrated food bar by way of emulsion technology. A typical emulsion formulation is:
|
Water |
50 |
|
Fats |
22 |
|
Sucrose |
12 |
|
Gum arabic |
10 |
|
Emulsifiers (mono & diglycerides) |
4 |
|
Sodium caseinate |
2 |
Emulsions represent a suitable and convenient means of attaining compatibility and reproducibility with a wide range of compositions and of serving as a binding agent for the base materials because their rheological characteristics permit efficient coating of the freeze-dried base materials. As an example, 80 parts of freeze-dried chicken in 38 -inch dices were blended with 20 parts of the above emulsion, pressed into bars and frozen, and freeze-dried; the result was unusually acceptable dry chicken bars of high nutritional value and high calorie content. A wide variety of other dry meat, vegetable, and fruit bars having a moist sensation when eaten has been prepared.
To evaluate moisture mimetic foods for acceptability a taste/texture profile panel was specifically trained to judge prototype samples against similar bars made without addition of the moisture mimetic composition. To do so a special terminology was developed to describe characteristics of differentiation such as initial moisture sensation, plasticity, amount of salivation, ease of chewing, crumbliness, cohesiveness of the chewed mass, dehydration of the mouth, ease of swallowing, stickiness on the teeth, aftereffect thirst, and general palatability. In applying these evaluation criteria to a number of moisture mimetic bars it was shown that an increase of 2 to 3 points was attained on a 10-point acceptability rating scale over similar bars without addition of the moisture mimetic agent. For example, a chicken stew bar was increased in acceptability from a 2.5 rating to 5. 5, plain chicken from 3.0 to 5. 0, and cereal bar from 3.5 to 6. 5. These are surprisingly moist-appearing items when eaten, yet are typically freeze-dried products with moisture content below about 2 percent. Typical products are shown in figure 2.
The foregoing are Just some examples of technically designed foods of the future which are not only for the average consumer but are also for the military and the astronaut, or aquanaut, since they fit admirably into the rigid projected requirements of stability, compactness, high caloric and nutritional value, convenience, and variety. Much more time and effort is needed to achieve their acceptance by the critical consumer, but they are on the threshold of reality.
