Working out how many recipes a sauce for professional kitchens needs
To grow a sauce with professional chefs, its maker has to know what they mean by the best one. A food company asked us to find out in four markets, first from chefs’ own picture of the ideal, then with blinded products.
- Client
- Food company
- Industry
- Foodservice
- Markets
- Four markets in the Americas and Asia
- Kind of work
- Concept and product testing
- Our role
- Chef research in four markets on what makes an ideal sauce
The question
Over the years, the company’s recipe had come to differ from market to market, shaped by local taste, local rules and local production.
That left two questions: what makes the best sauce for professional kitchens, in each market and across them, and whether one of the company’s existing recipes could serve them all.
Our approach
We spoke with chefs across professional kitchens, from executive chefs in restaurants and hotels to cooks in cafés and delis.
The ideal came before any product. Each chef first built their own picture of the perfect sauce, quality by quality and in their own words, and showed how those qualities related to each other.
Only then did chefs explore blinded products, chosen to cover the range sold around the world, judge them against their own criteria and say how they would prove one was best.
With every brand hidden, what chefs expected and what each recipe offered could be compared fairly, market by market.
What the team came away with
The product team had a map of what chefs want from the sauce across all four markets, with design principles for its developers.
Above all, it had chefs’ own criteria, in their own terms, to weigh every recipe choice against.
Related work
View concept and product testing case studies- What we do
- Concept testing and portfolio prioritization
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