Arctic Iced Coffee – the science behind developing our flavour and taste

When consumers buy a new food or drink product they are very quick to decide whether they like the taste, but it has often taken months of development behind the scenes to get the product just right.

CONSUMER INPUT

With our new Arctic Iced Coffee brand, we were keen to explore consumers’ attitudes to iced coffee - specifically RTD iced coffee - so we started by conducting some consumer research earlier this year. This helped us create a number of development concepts, which we then tested further with consumers in focus groups.

Out of this came five concepts that resonated most with the target consumers. We chose to take these forward into development as we feel they have the best chance of being successful, and to be the ones that consumers will love to drink!

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF INGREDIENTS

Once the product concept is decided, it’s time to break it down into the types of ingredients that we think will be required to give us the ‘building blocks’ of each recipe. For some product concepts this is easy as we will use an existing product as a base. For others this is more difficult, and we have to start from scratch.

After defining the building blocks we look first at our current ingredient portfolio to see what matches and we talk to our many ingredient suppliers to see what new ingredients they have that may work in our product.

Next, we make up a base recipe in our development kitchen for us to taste and share with the brand team. Depending on the product and how many new ingredients we may need to source, this phase could take from one week to several months.

When we were developing the first Arctic Iced Coffee (Café Latte) we spent a long time testing different coffees from different suppliers. We wanted a well-balanced, but complex coffee flavour that would resonate with coffee lovers. In the end the Café Latte was made with a blend of three different coffee ingredients that delivers the taste that our consumers love. This has now become the base for our new product development work.

GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT

We do a lot of work refining the product - for the Caramel Latte we made up many formulations with different styles and strengths of caramel flavour, and with different levels of sugar to see what level of sweetness worked best in the product. For others, we had to play around with different concentrations of sweetener and with different milk types (i.e. skimmed, semi skimmed) to see what worked best.

The best tasting products have the perfect balance of all ingredients, so it can take a lot of tweaking the dosage of the ingredients to get them all working together perfectly. This can mean that we have 10-20 combinations of ingredients for one product concept. Not surprisingly, this phase can take several weeks, and a lot of tasting sessions to narrow down the recipes.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

It is a team decision on which product is the favourite. I love seeing the reactions when my colleagues taste the products for the first time (good or bad), and also working as a team to get to the right recipe – even though we might not always all agree! It can be a challenge finding a recipe that everyone can agree on.

Taste is a very subjective quality and while one person may love one style of caramel, the next person may prefer another. We normally manage to come to a joint decision, but if we can’t, we let the consumer decide through further consumer testing. After all they will be the ones that we hope will be buying it every week.

Sometimes the staff test 30-40 different variations, other times we might get it right first time, but when we do come to a decision we can move on to factory trials. This helps us to check that the product still tastes great when it has been through the factory process. This can take a long time, with the product going through shelf life testing of two to six months, depending on the type of product.

THE PROOF IS IN THE PURCHASE

In the meantime, our brand team is busy designing the packaging and our technical team work on the legal elements of the pack copy, the product specification and the quality parameters that it will be tested against once it goes into production. Once all of this work is done, the product has passed its shelf life testing, and the packaging has been ordered, then we are ready for launch.

After so many months of development it's always exciting to see the product on the shelf – and to hear consumers’ thoughts on the taste and flavour. So far, we’ve had some brilliant feedback on the two flavours currently on sale - Café Latte and Caramel Latte – I’m eager to hear what people think of the others as they launch.

Do you work in product development for food or drinks? I’d be interested to hear what challenges you have faced in getting your ingredients balanced and the taste right?

Follow Arctic Iced Coffee on LinkedIn for more updates and developments about the brand.