What progress has your team made so far? Have any new ideas, questions, or challenges arisen from this work?

  • After testing some dumpling ideas last week, we spent most of our time designing our package, collecting data on consumer surveys, and financial planning this week. After testing and tasting the dumplings, we thought we could add a sauce for our dessert dumplings, just like how you would dip regular dumplings in vinegar or soy sauce. The more successful dumpling flavors were the chocolate ones and the peanut butter ones. The lease successful flavors were the mixed berries and the nut dumplings. The mixed berries dumplings were too sour to fit for a dessert. We tried adding sweet chocolate to moderate the sourness, but it had little effect. Unless we used artificial flavors for the mixed berries, we would be unable to produce a mixed berries dumpling filling that fits the word “dessert.” The nuts-fillings were too dry for a dumpling, so our group gave up on the idea. The food product development project has been smooth sailing; there were no major challenges that we encountered as a group.

What progress have you and your group made in collecting data? How was it collected? How has that supported your design choices?

  • We sent out a survey for consumer choices. The survey was a paper survey, and we only made people in the school do the survey. Most of our replies were from high school students, which might have affected our results. Because this survey was sent out during class time, we had limited replies, another factor affecting our results.

  • After collecting data, the top three flavors consumers wanted were Chocolate+Peanutbutter, Cookies and Cream, and Pizza. 
  • Most consumers would like to have the product sold in a supermarket.
  • 15RMB is the most common price in our survey.
  • 6 dumplings per box occurred the most in our results.
  • This survey helps us with our packaging design as it helps us understand what customers would expect when they think of dumplings.
  • This also helps us with marketing. It provides a brand name favored by the majority and helps us with pricing.

Have you (or your teammates) worked on visual or financial modeling? If so, provide some insight into those processes.

  • The survey helped us with our modeling. The financial model shows us the material cost and profit for each dumpling flavor.

  • The survey also helped us design our logo and packaging for our product. Our brand name, “Blissful Bite Delights,” is the most suggested name from our survey. Most of our product decisions depended on the survey we sent out: the finalized flavors, the amount of dumplings in packaging, and the packaging colors.