Defining what professional chefs expect from a seasoning

The question

A food company’s foodservice business had prototypes for the next generation of the seasonings it sells to restaurant kitchens, mid-tier and premium alike.

Every cue, from color and aroma to salt, texture and flavor, was written in technical terms. The company needed a benchmark in chefs’ terms: what each product should look, smell and taste like, from opening the pack to the finished dish, and whether one product could serve chefs in regions that cook differently.

Our approach

We judged each seasoning by what it did to a dish, the way a chef judges one at work.

Some chefs cooked with each product in turn, while others worked in pairs, describing a product to a partner, tasting each other’s dishes and guessing which product had made each one, a direct check of whether a difference reached the plate.

The prototypes sat beside competitors’ products and the company’s current ones throughout, so every reaction had a reference point a chef would recognize.

What the team came away with

The product team received a sensory benchmark for each seasoning, written in chefs’ own language.

Each element of the benchmark came with the range between too little and too much, a read of how the prototypes compared, and design principles for the products today and in the future.

Alongside it came a vocabulary drawn from the chefs themselves, with a read across regional cooking styles. Developers could describe a cue in the words their customers use, and set any new formulation against the same benchmark before it went back into a professional kitchen.