Designing the Perfect Texture and keeping track of it

The below article is taken from a Stable Micro Systems (SMS) newsletter. For the original article, or for more from SMS, please click here.

Texture is growing more important for product development every day, and creating and perfecting new textures can be a challenge as you work to ensure the best eating experience for consumers. We use multiple senses when we eat - taste, smell, sight, and sound - and 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 individual ingredients used, interactions with other ingredients in the formulation, processing conditions, and even the shelf life of a finished product. Once you’ve perfected your product, you’ll need to measure its texture and use this result as your ‘gold standard’. From here, you can compare future batches and assess whether it measures up to your product acceptance band. If a batch falls out of this acceptance band, it’s unlikely to match the consumer’s expectations, which may affect loyalty and future purchases.

How to Display Product Acceptable Bands on a Graph with Pass/Fail Criteria in the Spreadsheet

Start by creating a product acceptance band/zone for your ideal texture to measure future batches against. Viewing your data in this way may help you see quickly what is an acceptable quality and what is not acceptable. You can also test competitive products to see how they sit texturally against your own gold standard texture.

See how to set this up in Exponent in this quick video!

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. The example below illustrates 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 Analyzer to create a full textural story of your products.

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