What is your product idea and who is your audience? 

Our product that we have thought of are Tang Yuan S’mores. It is in the form of substitution, where we are replacing the marshmallows in the s’mores into Tang Yuan, a traditional Chinese dessert that is usually served during the Chinese New Year. It will be sold at a night market or street market where we can sell the Tang Yuan S’mores that we have just made and put together, allowing the customers to taste the best flavor of it.

Our intended audience of our product are young adults and teenagers. Because our food product is a dessert and is mostly sweet, our intended audience are those who would likely be a fan of sweets and desserts, and also open to new changes and innovations in foods.

 

What are your plans for data collection and modeling, as a group or individual? 

For our group, we will be achieving data collection in two ways. First, in order to determine the recipes of the different flavor of Tang Yuan and what way of cooking the Tang Yuan is the best to replace the marshmallows in s’mores, we will be working for one class in the kitchen and conducting a taste test. We will test out three flavors of Tang Yuan: black sesame, peanut, and red bean paste. We will also be testing out whether if the typical way of boiling the Tang Yuan or frying the Tang Yuan will be the most delicious way of cooking the Tang Yuan. Thus, in the session in the kitchen, through a taste test conducted with our group mates, we will collect data on the way of cooking of  each flavor of the Tang Yuan that will be the best and the most delicious as a replacement of the marshmallows in the s’mores.

We will also be conducting a consumer survey, posting photos of the intended product that we have made in our class in the kitchen and collecting data about the opinions of 40 random high school students at ISB. This will also be a form of data collection as we will be analyzing the data that we obtain from the students about their opinions on the food product and whether if they will be willing to buy it if it was an actual food product.

For the modelling aspect, we will be creating a financial model on determining the cost and price for the final product. In our class spent in the kitchen developing the recipe of the Tang Yuan S’mores, we will also be recording down the portions of each ingredient we use. These recorded numbers will then help us in calculating the cost and price of the final product.

 

What is your role in the team? 

In our group of 4 people, each of us will be working on a different part, including recipe and product development, consumer surveys, nutritional research, and financial planning.

Me and Valeriana will be working together to complete the recipe and product development and the financial planning, while Jia and Sadeem will be each working on the consumer survey and the nutritional research.

But for our session in the kitchen, we worked together as a whole group to taste out the different samples and agree upon our opinions of the different flavors and ways of cooking of the Tang Yuan.

 

What are some potential challenges you may run into over the next three weeks?

I think some challenges that could be present over the next three weeks is that there is possibly a lot of work to do?

For me and Valeriana, in terms of the recipe development, we have to recipes for 3 different flavored Tang Yuan S’mores, as well as also calculate all the small numbers for the prices and costs of each ingredient used in each s’more. There is a lot of small and detailed work that needs to be done.

For the consumer survey, there could be the potential challenge that not all of the people we send the consumer survey to will complete it, thus we might not have sufficient data. If this scenario happens, we will have to look for more people to complete the survey so that we can have relatively a sufficient amount of data.

For nutritional research, there is also a lot of different ingredients to be researched about its nutritional value, which would very likely to also be very detailed and time consuming.

Thus, with a relatively large workload that includes a lot of small, detailed parts, time management and planning is important to ensure that all of the work can be completed within the time given.