Progress: Successes and Challenges
Our team finished taste testing for different flavors of Tang Yuan s’mores, and we have all agreed that putting chocolate in s’mores with red bean paste and black sesame Tang Yuans would be too sweet, as a result, we have decided to only put chocolate in s’mores with peanut flavored Tang Yuans. This would better fit a wider range of audience, attracting audiences who like sweet desserts and audiences who may not be major fan of overly sweet desserts, since an audience who like sweets may purchase peanut-flavored Tang Yuan S’mores, in which the chocolate not only offers sweetness but also works well with the peanut flavoring in the Tang Yuan. We have successfully finished recipe development and are currently working on nutritional research which is attached below to the blog post.
Progress: Model
I have finished the financial model for the Tang Yuan s’mores and am currently finding a suitable percentage range for revenue and recommended sales price, in consideration of factors such as consumer age range and wage, setting for sales, production prices, and competition. The recommended sales price will be determined after Jia finishes her consumer survey, in which results will be analyzed to find an optimal price range for our target audience of teenagers and young adults. Attached below are the production costs of the Tang Yuan S’mores.
Tang Yuan S’mores Cost Analysis Spreadsheet copy
Progress: Data Collection
We have done taste tests during product development to figure out which method (boiled or fried) would taste best and alter our recipe accordingly. We have done the taste test within our own group, where we gave a rating out of 10 (10 is the highest) for each variation of the sample. This taste testing helped support our design choices since it helped us figure out the tastiest variation, since we had 6 at the beginning, and it helped us connect the product to the target audience better through collecting preferences since our samplers were basically our target audience (age-wise). We had a smaller survey sample size since there weren’t enough samples for a major sample size, which could be considered a limitation of taste testing.
However, we had a larger sample size for the consumer survey on consumer interest in buying our S’mores which makes up for a small sampling group for the taste test. The consumer survey is currently in progress, but the survey would help support and alter our design choices of the current recommended sales price determined through a suggested percentage of revenue that has been researched. This would help us better determine a suitable price, since the percentage of revenue researched may not consider our target audience; thus, this helps us determine a better price range. The survey also helps us further determine consumers’ preferences on the food itself, asking for preferred textures and flavors, thus making up for a small sampling size on the taste test.