Defining Our Product

This week, our group defined the dish we will be presenting. The product that we have chosen to pursue from the three original products is the Chinese chicken and gravy. This recipe combines a traditional stir-fry dish that can be commonly found in Chinese restaurants with a spicy-barbecue American twist (a big trend in today’s market). We feel that adding a well-known flavor trend to this already popular recipe will be a huge hit with consumers and help us find the market niche that our dish fits in to.

While overcoming these milestones, there have been some obstacles our group has ran into. Some of these problems include sharing space with multiple lab groups, running out of knives, cutting boards, or other supplies, and keeping raw meat separate from cooked meat. We have worked around these problems by learning to keep our space usage to a minimum, washing supplies after other groups have used them as needed, and removing raw or cooked product from the area as soon as we are finished with it. As more issues arise in the process of this product development project, we will continue to work around them to create the best dish possible.

This Wednesday, our group will be performing sensory analysis on our selected dish to look at the consumer acceptability ratings. Our product contains known strengths and weaknesses, but we are hoping the sensory analysis results will reveal more about how we can make our dish more desirable. Some strengths include a familiar, reliable choice as a meal and the combination of sweet and spicy tastes (a flavor trend in today’s grocery stores). Some weaknesses include the texture of our chicken (we will see if sensory reveals the meat is not tender enough), health status, and the saltiness of the dish.

After our group performed sensory analysis, the results were positive (for the most part). We chose to do a sweeter chicken and gravy dish and a spicier chicken and gravy dish. During the analysis, taste testers were given both samples of each dish, two crackers, a cup of water, and two scoring sheets. The taste tester’s data showed that the spicier product was the more preferred one. Strengths for the spicy product included taste and appearance (red color due to siracha). Weaknesses included juiciness and texture. Our group is discussing if we should prepare the chicken in a different way or even vacuum tumble it for a short amount of time.

The meat our group has been using to make our dish is frozen chicken breast that is thawed in the refrigerator. The only quality issues we seem to have with the meat in our product is juiciness and texture. This could be due to the freezing/thawing, affecting the functionality of the myofibrillar proteins. The biggest and most noticeable difference in the chicken breast from the grocery store and from Auburn’s facilities is the size. The grocery store seems to carry breasts that are much larger than breasts processed at Auburn’s facilities.