Towards consumer driven food new product development: a closed-loop platform

The purpose of this paper is to present a closed-loop formulation design and development platform using a preference marketplace mechanism combined with a model-based methodology for driven consumers in the New Product Development (NPD) process with a rapid responding to changing their requirements. It uses a creative method to integrate consumers at an early stage of the NPD process to generate new product ideas for quality attributes of the new formulations and then manufacture to deliver on-demand, at a precise and fast pace. These attributes are identified based on the gamification mechanism to obtain consumer preferences and their limits. At this stage, the personalised attributes will be prepared, tested and assessed in a novel continuous formulation system. The target formulated product is then projected in the formulation design space to find better similarities with the successful formulation using statistical experimental design and multivariate statistical analysis approaches to produce and deliver efficiently. The formulation obtained by the system is compared with consumers’ preferences in terms of sensory descriptors to be regarded as a final product for those market segments and decentralised markets. A real-life case study of food-grade orange flavoured beverage is the system model.