Artículo What Separates The Winners From The Loosers...

Trends in Food Science & Technology 14 (2003) 58–64

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What separates the winners from the losers in new food product development?
Barbara Stewart-Knox* and Peter Mitchell
Northern Ireland Centre for Diet and Health (NICHE), University ofUlster, Coleraine BT521SA,UK (tel: +4428703-24965; e-mail: b.stewart@ulster.ac.uk)
The low rate of innovation and high rate of failure of newfood products is a cause for concern. Whilst a wide range of product development process factors are known to influence product success and failure, these predictors are based almost exclusively upon investigations into ‘industrial’ rather than food products. In this paper, an analysis of existing models of product development is carried out, a recently developed model for reduced fat food productdevelopment is described and implications for best practice in food product development discussed. Market and consumer knowledge and retailer involvement are key success factors in food product development. # 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

new food products (72–88%) continue to fail (Buisson, 1995; Lord, 1999; Rudolph, 1995). If a ‘new’ food product is defined as ‘one that is newto the consumer’, only 7–25% of food products launched can be considered truly novel (Lord, 1999; Rudolph, 1995). This low rate of innovation, coupled with the high failure rate of food products following market launch implies that the methodology for new food product development urgently needs improvement. The process needs to become more ‘focused, quantitative, rapid and knowledge based’ (Earle,1997a). Nevertheless, analyses of the product development process have almost exclusively focused upon developing models for ‘industrial’ product outcomes (Burchill & Fine, 1997; Calatone & Cooper, 1979; Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1996; Ford & Sternman, 1998), whilst neglecting food products. So far, only five studies appear to have addressed issues relating to product development in the food sector,one of which is a qualitative study (Parr, Knox, & Hamilton, 2001), two of which are surveys (Hoban, 1998; Iiori, Oke, & Sanni, 2001) and very recently, two predictive models of food product development (Knox, Parr, & Bunting, 2001; Kristensen, Ostergaard, & Juhl, 1998). Findings derived from previous research into the product development process both generally and specifically in relation to foodare discussed with reference to best practice.

The product development process
The product development process has been described as a five to eight-step process including idea or concept generation and screening, research, development and product testing and marketing launch activities (Rudder, Ainsworth, & Holgate, 2001). Early models of product development implied that those companies whoemployed a stepwise new product process were more successful (Booze-Allen & Hamilton, 1982; Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1987). However, it is now generally accepted that a stepwise model of food product development is over simplistic and that a concurrent or overlapping, flexible team oriented product development process is more advantageous than a sequential process (Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1996; Earle,1996; Ford & Sternman, 1998; Jenkins, Forbes, Durrani, & Banerjee, 1997; Krishnan, Eppinger, & Whitney, 1997; Urban & Hauser, 1993). Dahan and Hauser (2001) describe an ‘end to end’ model, within which different

Introduction
New food product innovation is necessary for survival in today’s competitive global market. Yet, despite the large amount of research, published on optimising the productdevelopment process, the vast majority of

* Corresponding author.

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stages are integrated and sometimes repeating and including factors external to the process such as...