A natural extension

On the heels of the successful launch of its Young & Tender line of bagged spinach, NewStar, a Salinas, Calif.-based produce firm, was wondering what to do for an encore. A line of salad kits featuring spinach in combination with a dressing and/or other ingredients seemed like a natural idea. But rather than introducing a me-too product to the already-crowded salad kit market, the company wanted to add a gourmet twist. "We thought we had a pretty good system for growing and processing spinach," says Bob Whitaker, NewStar's vice president of R&D and value-added operations. "And our idea was to leverage that to the next step to come out with a line of gourmet spinach salad kits. We really wanted to see some high-end flavor profiles put together with our spinach so we could offer our customers something a little bit better."

Working with The National Food Laboratory (NFL), a Dublin, Calif., research firm, NewStar was able to dream up, test, and bring to market the Young & Tender line of spinach salad and sauté kits. The salad kits, which debuted in 1999, come in "crispy bacon" and "honey citrus" dressing varieties and feature accompaniments like bacon pieces or chopped walnuts and cranberries. The "3-Minute Sauté" kit is flavored with sun-dried tomato and roasted garlic.

Idea generation

The process began with an idea generation phase, says Christie Hoyer, vice president of product development and evaluation, The National Food Laboratory. Sessions were conducted with NFL chefs, food technologists, and other culinary arts workers. "We did a number of brainstorming sessions, game-playing, and other, more coordinated exercises. From that we came up with numerous flavor concepts for the salads and the sauté mixes. The next step was to use filtering techniques - we had a large number of flavors and we were trying to get them down a manageable number and also come up with the best ideas to propose to NewStar," she says.

The filtering involved looking at trends in the restaurant industry and also looking at technical feasibility, to find ideas that would be attractive to consumers but also workable from a food technology standpoint.

The list was pared to six flavors - three salad kits and three sauté mixes - which were then evaluated by NewStar management, a process that helped ease worries that the company might be taking too big a step in introducing a line extension, Whitaker says. "We went to the NFL facilities with our marketing people and tasted the products and talked about them. That built up a sense of ownership within our company because we're a produce company, we're not heavily endowed in marketing research capabilities. So it was useful to meet with the food technologists and taste the prototypes because it made us confident that we were on the right track."

Next came the first round of consumer testing. At this stage, Hoyer says, NFL wanted to validate the product concepts and also gauge reactions to them. A four-phase process was conducted with male and female consumers aged 21-64 who were their family's primary grocery shopper and who were positive toward spinach salad and cooked fresh spinach.

The first phase gathered reactions to the concept of a line of gourmet salad and sauté kits and determined purchase intent for each of the flavors (based on descriptions of the flavors, not actual tasting). Next the respondents tried the product prototypes, which were rotated so that half of the group tried the sautés first and half tried the salads first. "We gave them a description of the flavor in a kit and then had them sample it. They then gave us purchase interest, their opinions on the product concept fit, as well as specific information such as the amount of dressing, the amount of sauté mix, etc.," Hoyer says. "So at this phase we were trying to get reactions to prototypes and whether we needed to modify them in any way and determine if the prototypes met the expectations they had after hearing the concept."

The third phase was a test of packaging. Respondents were taken to a separate area featuring a mock store display of three packaging concepts and asked to rank their preferences for the different graphics. In the fourth phase the consumers viewed a large copy of the nutritional information for a salad kit and a sauté kit. "Without specifically asking about it, we were interested in their reaction to things such as fat content," Hoyer says. "They had given us purchase interest, but was there anything about the nutrition information that would make them less likely to buy the product?"

The testing validated that gourmet salad kits and sauté kits were of interest to consumers and also showed which flavors were most popular. "In the salad kits, the honey citrus flavor profile was very much desired by consumers," Whitaker says. "They liked the idea that they could put walnuts and dried cranberries on the salad to give it a unique flavor. On the sauté side, the sun-dried tomato-garlic flavor profile really carried the day. Consumers liked being able to cook something up quickly. It fit the idea of convenience, having a hot side dish with little prep time, because we were looking at something that you could prepare in about three to five minutes."

Next, NewStar conducted focus groups in two U.S. cities. Again, respondents were introduced to the spinach salad mix and sauté concepts, and they viewed packaging mock-ups and sampled the products. Everything tested well, Whitaker says. "The concept scored high. People liked this idea, it met their needs. And after they tasted the products, they indicated we delivered against the concept - in many cases the scores actually went up after they tasted it, especially in the case of the honey citrus variety."

But there was one new wrinkle: respondents made it clear that NewStar had to add a bacon dressing variety to the salad mix line. "Even though we had tried to stay away from a bacon flavor profile, it was just absolutely associated with spinach. People went into long stories about how they painstakingly prepared their bacon spinach dressing. These people were passionate about it! So we realized coming out of this that we were going to have to add a bacon dressing as well," Whitaker says.

Economically feasible?

NewStar took the findings from the focus groups and went back to work with the NFL on the economics of the new products, examining ingredients, shelf life, and costs, to determine if NewStar could produce the high-quality flavor profiles it desired using ingredients that might be more reliably available and cost-effective. "This is a very competitively-priced business and there is a top end to what you can expect a consumer to pay for prepared salads," Whitaker says. "So we wanted to make sure that we lived within those guidelines and could present it to the retailers at a price that was attractive as well."

The process of making the ingredient list cost-effective is a combination of art and science, Hoyer says. "One advantage we had was that we had the starting formulas and what the starting flavor profiles were supposed to be and we looked at them and said, OK, is there any way that we can achieve the same flavor profiles but cut down on the costs of the ingredients? We were able to do a couple of things with some flavorings that cut a pretty good chunk out of the cost of the product while retaining the same flavor profiles."

Gradual climb

Since the salad and sauté mixes were introduced, they have been a hit with retailers and with consumers, Whitaker says. "Sales took off very well. A few accounts took to them right away, and it has been a gradual climb ever since. The products comprise about a quarter of the total business in spinach for us on a unit basis. It gives our customers a choice. Everybody wants to take the Young & Tender spinach - that's still far and away our biggest seller - but if they want other facings, this gives the retailer a lot of choices.

"We have also gotten a lot of positive feedback from consumers. We have an 800 number on our bags and it's not unusual to get two or three phone calls per month - which is amazing - where people say how much they enjoy the dressings and the kit concepts."

A recipe for good food testing

The NFL’s Christie Hoyer offers a few quick tips for companies considering conducting some food research.

1) Be aware of consumer fatigue during testing. "Not only in terms of taste and aromas - which is what a lot of people take into account - but also in terms of mental fatigue. Sometimes clients just simply ask consumers to do too much."

2) Second, there are myriad small details to manage when testing food, including product preparation, food temperature, serving size, the types of serving containers used, etc. "It's important to use a firm that has a lot of experience in this type of testing so that they pick up on all of the nuances," Hoyer says.

3) As with any kind of research, recruiting is an important factor. Make sure the firm gets you the target audience you are looking for.

4) Hoyer also recommends using a facility that is designed for food testing. Proper ventilation, for example, is necessary to avoid letting in extraneous smells during the research, which could mar the process and result in respondents reacting to scents that aren't part of the test product.