Food Product Development Software

What sort of issues could our Food Product Development Software solve?

• Spreadsheets used for managing NPD projects are not working optimally (we know how frustrating this can be, which is one of the primary reasons for developing our food product development software, after years of experience in the food and drink industry)

• Achieving new product launch deadlines is a stressful process for all involved.

• Key food safety and regulatory steps are sometimes missed or rushed resulting in food safety and audit non-conformity risks.

• Managing external suppliers and partners results in added confusion.

• Different departments across the business are not well aligned on launches.

• Communications regarding changes of plan within a launch and during the launch process are inconsistent.

• Internal deadlines, milestones and stage gates are often missed.

• Meeting launch deadlines requires a heroic effort and often feels like a miracle.

• Managing launches sometimes feels like herding cats.

What are the usual stages in a new Food Product Development process?

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list and we would be delighted to hear your suggestions for additions.

All food product development starts with the generation of ideas. The Idea Generation will vary depending on whether the business is a branded business or a private label business. Traditionally in branded business the retailer or brand owner would issue requests for samples to their selected private label suppliers, often at very short notice with rapid turnaround of samples required.

Recently many retailers expect category champion suppliers to generate the ideas and bring them to the retailer. Today’s private label reality is a mixture of the two.

Branded businesses own the entire idea generation stage.

Shortlisted ideas from the idea generation phase progress to the next stage of the new food product development process which is typically Idea Screening. At this stage ideas are validated across multiple criteria such as:

• Ability for the business to manufacture the suggested products.
• Levels of competition and exiting capacity across the competition.
• Targeted selling prices, wholesale prices and forecasted gross margins.
• How the new products fit with the business strategy.
• Raw material availability.
• Capacity.

The next stage in the new food product development process is Concept Development & Testing. This will often entail creation of kitchen samples for internal feedback followed by consumer sampling. This is often an iterative process until final concepts are signed off.

A common mistake we see at this stage is that product recipes change but costings are not updated which can result in shocks further down the road. These shocks are rarely of the pleasant type where the profitability of the launched product is higher than the original costing. Too often changes have been made during development which reduces profitability, sometimes significantly.

Signed off concepts progress to the next step in the new food product development process which is Product Development & Factory Trials. This is a very labour intensive stage with many departments, including food safety, regulatory, quality, procurement, production, engineering and finance involved. All of the validation tasks to ensure that the product being developed meets food safety, quality, regulatory and profitability requirements are met, are completed in this stage.

For private label businesses this is often the stage when first production is delivered to customer distribution centres.

Branded business may have a Test Marketing phase in their new food product development process where various marketing messages and approaches are tested and validated prior to the commencement of a full and often expensive marketing campaign.

Both branded and private label businesses may have a Commercialisation stage where activites such as sampling programs, promotions and other activiities to drive consumer adoption of the new product are delivered.

The final and often overlooked stage in every new food product development process is the Post Launch Review where lessons learned and improvement ideas are captured and fed back into to process to create a closed loop of continuous improvement.

Managing all of these stages at scale, and speed, without a leading food product development software solution such as QADEX is akin to herding cats.

What are the benefits of speeding up your npd and releasing products to market faster?

The holy grail for everyone is to deliver new food product development faster, better, with everyone across the business fully engaged. This results in competive advantage and higher profitability for the businesses that get the process right.

The alternative is lost market share, a decline in profitability and and a greater need to compete on price.

Is Food Product Development software widely used in the food industry today?

No. There are many approaches to food product development software with many providers offering solutions. These are often product life cycle management (PLM) systems which are often at their core product specification systems. These systems are really useful in the Product Development Phase but have less value in the other stages of the new food product development process.

On the other side of the fence are project management based systems, of which there are many in all flavours and sizes. These systems tend to be multiple industry centric and while can bring structure to the food product development process, they can be missing key functionality required to be classed as a market leading food product development software solution.

What differentiates QADEX from alternatives is the ability to combine the best of project management systems, with the best of product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.