Flavor Panels (aka Dinner Parties)

How do food companies make decisions on product formulas or recipes? They rely on food panels or groups of trained flavor panelists to tell them what they like. In many ways Supper Clubs are like food panels. The menu developer and the cook are looking to their dinner party guests to tell them what they liked. And, what was a bad idea.

A few weeks ago I developed a menu for our local supper club based on Tapas. This last weekend there were 3 dinner parties in our neighborhood where 27 people were flavor panelists telling us what they liked and what they did not. Supper Clubbers by nature are nice. It is pretty hard to get real, critical feedback directly. You might hear though the grapevine that somebody didn’t like something. But it is rare.

The one theme of feedback that I hear is that my menus are too hard and too complicated.  GUILTY! I developed the original menu with 12 items and had the goal to get it down to 6. We had a trial run dinner party and my flavor panel (aka dinner party guests) argued long and loud to keep it at 10. This translated into a 13 page menu/recipe packet. There is no question that the sheer volume of recipes was daunting. The good news is that with 8 to 10 people at the dinner party there was plenty of opportunity to delegate and share the workload.

The story that is often told in this blog space is that I am a trained flavor panelist. The truth is that I have been trained 3 times. One of the reasons for going through training three times, is that I am not very good. A truly discerning palette is rare and a gift. For example, I worked in the chocolate business and we had a senior Sales Manager named Bill who thought he was the expert on chocolate. Well after training and testing it turned out that Bill couldn’t hold a candle to his secretary Sharon. Poor Bill never recovered.

Another reality is the old marketing line we used to use for our Flavors of Cooking line of products at Kraft Food Ingredients: “Nothing influences that flavor food more than how it is cooked”.It is so true. Our friend that hosted the dinner party that we attended, explained to me why she is intimated by hosting a party where the author of the menu is a guest. She reminded me of the time where 3 groups of dinner parties were merged into one house. So 3 different cooks prepared each item. Most of the dishes looked completely different. My friend was worried that the dishes at her party would not look anything like what the author had intended. The good news was twofold:

  1. Everything I saw looked exactly as it was supposed to.
  2. It doesn’t really matter if it looks like what the author intended as long as it tastes pretty good.

Did your flavor panel like it? That’s all that matters!

 

Tapas Menu

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