Designing the perfect texture and keeping track of it
Texture is playing more pronounced roles in product development and creating new and just-right textures can be a new territory for product formulators trying to ensure the best eating experience for consumers. We eat with our eyes, nose, tongue, and ears, so in order to gain maximum enjoyment and pleasure from our food, all of the sensory attributes must be in harmony.
Several factors affect the texture of a finished product: the type of ingredients used, interactions with other ingredients in the formulation, processing conditions, and how long the shelf life of a finished product is. Once you’ve made your perfect texture product you’ll need to measure its texture and use this result as your ‘gold standard’. From here, you can compare all future batches of product made to assess whether it measures up to the product acceptance band that you have created. If a batch falls out of this acceptance band it is not likely to match the consumer’s expectations of the product and may well affect loyalty and future purchase of that product.
How to display product acceptable bands on a graph with pass/fail criteria in the spreadsheet
Example results showing 3 graphs falling within the product acceptance band and one falling out
Create a product acceptance band/zone for your ideal texture to measure future product batches against. Seeing your data in this way might help you notice quickly what is an acceptable quality and what is not acceptable. You may also use this to test competitive products to see how they sit texturally against your own gold standard texture.
To see how to set this up in Exponent Connect watch this quick video.
How do other professionals display their textural data?
Texture experts Ingredion create texture maps of the sensory eating experiences of their products and (the textures of similar competitive products) like this:
Another way of viewing data is to plot all sensory features of a product in a spider or radar chart. In this example they illustrate just how close they came to reproducing a low-fat formulation when compared with its full-fat counterpart.
These maps could also be built using results obtained from your Texture Analyser to create a full textural story of your products.
How to see the maximum value/minimum value of multiple displayed graphs and more
Did you know that Exponent Connect software has the ability to view the maximum and minimum statistics for the range of your displayed graphs? The statistics include highest displayed peak value, lowest displayed peak value, mean of displayed peak values and standard deviation of the displayed peak values for all the visible graphs.
Lines are projected across the window at the relevant levels as a visual guide to the values.
If a peak is off the screen it is not included in the statistics so you have a degree of control by zooming into the data.
The position and format of the text can be configured in the usual Colours and Style window (F4 default shortcut key).
You’ll see a wide range of other styling preferences in this window to customise your graphs, fonts and other appearance options.
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