Develop- Week 4

Developing Our Product

This week, we were able to conclude the development of our final product. Our Homestyle Kofta Meatball was modified to exceed the expectations of taste and appearance. We are quite please with what our group has to offer. We developed a product that has so much diverse flavor that all types of customers would love to consume. The convenience and diversity of flavor is what sets this particular product apart from other products in the market. This is one like no other! We are more than excited to present this product and see how well our fellow peers enjoy it. To see are delicious recipe click here.

What has your group accomplished during that week?

As we approach the final steps to finishing this project, we made a batch of our Homestyle Kofta Meatballs to be able to present to the class. This includes the Poultry Science department to take part in a taste test competition against the other group. We are very much confident in our product and will no doubt be successful.

We were able to accomplish multiple aspects of our product such as size and quality of flavor. We decided that instead of using broccoli, we wanted to go with the original idea of using spinach for the stuffing. We came to this conclusion from the results of our Sensory Evaluation Analysis. Other suggestions were made about using something other than broccoli to coincide with the cheese in the center of the homestyle meatball.

We were also able to develop the uniformity as well as the size of the meatball that we would like this product to be at. Each meatball was relatively the same 1 oz. size in weight. This was accomplished by using a ¼” ice cream scoop. We were very well please with the unique flavoring and bite size appearance.

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

This week we were faced with the challenge of preparing our product for a large number of people on Friday. Approximately a 50 member panel will evaluate our product for quality. Making a five pound batch instead of a two pound batch took a lot more time and effort. We put in several hours worth of work to prepare our product for presentation. We tried to make sure that all of our products were of uniform size and that they appeared to be of the highest standard. Due to our sensory evaluation from last week we decided to create a smaller meatball this time. This made us to par-fry our meatballs at a slightly higher temperature. We are interested in seeing how our product reforms after being frozen for a few days.

Also, developing a nutritional label for our product was a major problem that we faced. Our group used software at the meat lab to incorporate all ingredients in our product into an appropriate nutrition label. Monday we gave our group presentation to the class and it was very successful in showing the thought process behind our product. We had good results and tackled our problems as a team this week.

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

Due to limited resources and time we were unable to develop our own package but, we have seen packages on the market that are similar to what we would like to use. We came to the conclusion that our packaging would be similar to the resealable bags that can be found in the frozen section at your local convenient stores. We have also suggested the idea of a smaller quantity sized packaging by using resealable cardboard box type of packaging.

In conclusion we have enjoyed working on this project together, and have learned valuable time management skills along with product development skills. We are proud of the product we made and are excited about its possibilities.