McCain plans customer taste panel

Frozen food giant McCain plans to set up a customer taste panel to improve its new product development (NPD) in foodservice.

While it is common for food manufacturers to use a combination of consumer and sensory taste panels to aid NPD, McCain felt that inviting its foodservice customers to try new concepts would make the development process even more efficient.

“We’re starting up a panel made up of chefs from various pubs and contract caterers so that they can try the products in the early stages of development before we go on to the next level,” said McCain’s business development chef Donnie Munro. “It’s more complex [to develop new products] for foodservice because they have specific types of customers - not like retailers where there’s more of a mix of people.”

Munro was appointed by McCain last November in a bid to help the processor build closer relationships with its customers. “I’ll be working with companies to understand what their needs are - one chef to another chef,” he said.