Integrated qualitative/quantitative techniques for food product quality planning

Traditionally, food product manufacturers have used methods such as market research and sensory characterization for product quality planning. However, within the quality planning scope, the results of the quality planning methods have not been explored to explicitly translate into the manufacturing stage. This article presents the development of an advanced food product quality planning approach applied at the Black and White Cookie Company to translate customer requirements into manufacturing using integrated qualitative/quantitative techniques. The results showed that the method provided the manufacturer a good quantitative assessment of the product and process for addressing customer's needs, which are valid inputs for quality planning and the successful transition out of the planning phase. Also, the use of appropriate initial control charting during short runs in the preproduction stage verifies the process capability and stability. This was found especially effective for the food production system since the product feature variation is high, production is in small batches and data are of appropriate nature to fit the short-run statistical process control charts. The approach can be further extended to integrate into the quality control and the improvement stages with more data available during those phases.