The South Australian Food Centre has the facilities and expertise to help your food business in the area of new product development.
How many times have you seen a food business reinvent itself with a new or 'improved' product?
The development of a new product can re-energise a business; give it new life, new direction, a new profile - and a new growth plan. New product development, or NPD, describes a process of bringing a service or product to the market.
According to Andrew Barber, Principal Food Technologist at the South Australian Food Centre, NPD forms an essential part of good business planning practices
"The food industry is constantly evolving, so it is essential for food businesses to grow and evolve with it. Developing new products, or revising existing products is part of that process - whether you want to grow your business or retain existing market share," he said.
NPD activities can largely be grouped into two areas: innovation and renovation.
"Innovation means a change to create a new product from existing or new technologies, ingredient or packaging," Andrew said.
"Renovation refers to a reformulation or reposititioning of an existing product and can include improvements to flavour and texture, introduction of new flavour variants or improving the nutritional composition."
Andrew said businesses could benefit in a number of ways from the process of NPD,
"Developing a new product involves many areas of the business working together to achieve a common goal. This can flow through into improvements in communication across the business and create a more effective team. It also reminds old and new customers that the business is out there, doing something new, or improving on an old favourite."
However, he said NPD could also divert staff from essential activities and overload production staff.
"If not checked it can also continue on when there is relatively little success of the product reaching commercialisation."
Andrew said by putting a process in place that employed a series of gates, stages, and stop/go points, businesses could keep a check on this and make an informed call as to whether a product should go ahead to the next stage of development or not.
Andrew said the SA Food Centre offered a number of services to assist food business during the product development journey including access to food technologists, a product development kitchen, processing & packaging systems as well as business management and marketing.
If you're not developing new products and ‘moving with the times' you're actually going backwards.
So says food consultant Wayne Lyons, who has assisted many food businesses with new product development-related marketing and consumer advice.
"If you walk down a supermarket aisle, or read a restaurant menu or pick up a new cookbook, the majority of what you look at and read didn't exist 10 years ago."
"And if you think about the way Australians consume food, and the way we cook, you see that has changed too."
As such, Wayne says it's a wise move for food businesses to stay abreast of the trends - and the competition.
But how do food businesses go about developing a new product?
Wayne said there are four areas food businesses need to research when considering developing a new product - market research, consumers and trends, market intelligence and sector information.
"First, food businesses need to understand themselves, their products and what they produce."
Then they need to do their market research - into general consumer and current market trends.
He said the internet contained a wealth of information on market research and consumer trends and his advice to food businesses was to "get on the web and start Googling."
"Businesses need to have a good understanding of what’s changing consumer behaviour. Is it climate change, obesity or the move towards organics? And then they need to ask themselves: "how does that impact on what we are doing?"
Secondly, he said businesses needed to gather data on consumers and what motivated them to buy a particular product; was it the brand, the price, the flavour or because of its health benefits?
Third was market intelligence.
"The customer and the consumer can often be two different things - particularly for food businesses. So now you need to determine how much do you understand about your customers and what motivates them? What are their requirements?
Finally, food businesses need to keep abreast of what is happening in their particular sector in terms of new products and new initiatives.
"The challenge then is to bring all that information together and make it meaningful."
Wayne says it is at this point that the development process can begin in earnest.
Contact
Wayne Lyons
p +61 409 400 490
e wlyons3@bigpond.com