Dive Brief:
- Product reformulations, whether they're to exchange artificial for natural ingredients, make products gluten- or allergen-free, or reduce salt or sugar levels, are increasingly common as food and beverage manufacturers adapt to changing consumer health preferences.
- While reducing ingredients and/or adding alternative ingredients may be desirable from a perceived health standpoint, those changes can impact not only ingredients lists and nutrition facts but also critical factors like texture, taste, and color.
- A University of Minnesota School of Dentistry professor helped build a robot originally designed for testing dental restoration materials that can chomp down on foods and provide textural feedback through audio frequencies the robot mouth emits while chewing. Manufacturers can then compare the frequencies between existing products and their "healthier" reformulations to discern any potential differences in texture or chewing experience.
Dive Insight:
The team is also developing a way to detect vapors that the foods emit when the robot chews them, which could help manufacturers deduce changes in flavor in addition to texture. Another machine from the dental school produces three-dimensional X-rays of cereal's internal structure to illustrate how porous the product's walls are, which can enable manufacturers to measure crispness.
Manufacturers have to keep in mind changes in texture, taste, and color that occur from ingredient adjustments or else risk losing consumers that have been devotees to the original product formulation for years or decades. This is why it can take a considerable amount of time for a company to make widespread portfolio ingredient changes.
Mars was one of the most recent companies to commit to switching out artificial colors for natural ones across its human foods portfolio, but Mars gave itself a five-year deadline in anticipation of the challenges the company will face in sourcing some of these natural color ingredients.
Through this robot and other efforts, food companies aim to make taste and texture more scientific and statistical, which could lead to improvements developed in a laboratory and informed by data rather than subjective consumer feedback. However, everything from product packaging to nostalgia can impact consumers' perceptions of food and beverage flavors and experiences, so robots can't replicate or predict consumer preferences as much as manufacturers would like.