Adamo Foods
Adamo Foods is a food tech start-up company that have developed natural, plant-based, whole cut meat alternatives to steak, using fungi. The company is aiming to launch products that avoid any unnecessary processing and are aiming for these alternatives to be healthy and clean label. They are also working hard to achieve superior textures and high-quality flavours to gain a USP over other plant-based and meat alternatives. For this reason, the company was interested to take a deep dive into the sensory attributes so important to this product category.
Project brief
- Learn sensory methodology that can be implemented in their company to evaluate real beef steak and identify the most important sensory attributes to target their product development.
- Learn how the company can set up their own sensory evaluation sessions with consumers to support their product development, by getting consumers to evaluate both competitor and their own products.
- Understand what they can do as a small company, in-house, rather than contracting out their work
The response
- A report was written suggesting protocols for rapid methodology for qualitative descriptive analysis which has worked for other small companies.
- A demonstration of the suggested rapid qualitative descriptive analysis was carried out in practice, with members of the company and the Food Innovation Centre forming the panel, to teach how to carry out the session in practice.
- A report was written suggesting protocols for consumer acceptability testing which will allow evaluation of samples in their own right, for degree of liking, as well as in a format where the scores can be compared with competitor product. This incorporated a way of getting consumers to focus on the key sensory attributes for the category generated in the profiling session.
Benefit to the business
The business gained new knowledge on how to conduct descriptive flavour profiling to map out key sensory attributes associated with Beef steak. Also, the company can use the qualitative and quantitative methodologies presented by the Food Innovation Centre to gain useful product insights, such as the sensory attributes that are most relevant to the consumers, to narrow down the focus areas for development.