Week 2 - Discovery

Week 2 - Discover - Ways to Make Our Product Unique

Discovery:

To choose a product, we had to example a few key aspects of the food industry. These are our competition, potential market share, and our target audience. After perusing all of the grocery stores around town, we have come to realize that there is no major competition for our product. There are some products such as stuffed chicken breast filled with whatever combination of ingredients is popular, but our fried kofta meatballs fill a niche market. This gives us all of the market share we desire, as well as giving us a target audience of not only those who are familiar with this type of product, but also those who need a convenient, healthy, and relatively inexpensive snack.

What has your group accomplished during that week? Include an appropriate artifact to justify the accomplishment.

During week two, our group worked on enhancing the flavor of our product from week one. Through continued brainstorming and discussion, Suryo recommended that we make kofta meatballs in order to give a cultural edge as well as better flavor. Kofta meatballs are common in south Asian, Indian, Mediterranean, and also Middle-Eastern cuisines and are essentially just a spiced meatball. They are often served as a fast food dish in kebab form. This improves our product choice even further, allowing us to introduce it as a convenience food.

This is our second recipe that we are attempting, with one more yet to be tried. We believe that this kofta meatball is our best accomplishment yet and will likely be the final product.

What were the problems your group was faced with this week? How did they overcome and what was the result?

Our group faced two problems this week, although neither of them were catastrophic. Our first problem was locating all of the desired ingredients. The two ingredients that we had difficulty locating were a tomato powder and a “green chile” that the group wanted. To remedy this, we used a tomato-basil powder and substituted a poblano chile.

The second issue we faced was combining ingredients into our meat batter in a desirable manner. After cooking, we realized that our onions were not minced finely enough and that the chile we substituted did not yield the desired flavor profile. The group did, however, come up with a great solution. We opted to use chile and onion powder (separate items, of course). Not only does this make storage of the ingredients easier, it also cuts cost and the onion powder helps in retaining moisture, having an effect similar to that of phosphate. And as an added bonus, the red color of the chile powder gives some much needed color to the meat.

What objectives/milestones were not met and what is the plan of action to achieve those?

A major milestone that we have not yet achieved is reheating our product after it has been frozen for several days. This is not a hurdle that was too difficult to tackle, we just simply have not yet had the time. To get this done, we froze samples of our meatballs and after they have been in the freezer for a two more days, we will remove them and reheat them in the oven to see how the turn out.