Translating Food Concepts Across Categories

Spent any time in a test kitchen lately? If so, then you're no stranger to the inescapable sense of dread that settles in when deadlines lurk around every corner. Management and marketing have spoken, and product developers must generate new product lineups according to schedules that seem to defy the space-time continuum. But the laws of physics are no match for companies whose fortunes rise and fall in proportion to their product facings. With competing lines and "me-too" products making shelf space harder to claim, "It's become quite a real-estate game in the grocery store," says Phil Katz, president, Shuster Laboratories, Inc., Canton, MA.

If you want to play to win, even stopping to take a breath can send you to the sidelines. With niche markets and target demos multiplying like so many cells in a petri dish, manufacturers feel pressured either to corner one of those markets, or be all things to all buyers. So R&D teams are casting about for any way to make a bid for consumers' taste buds, fast. And, notes Marc Halperin, culinary director and partner, Center for Culinary Development, San Francisco, "The taste bud of the consumer has a very short attention span."

But, asks Nancy Rodriguez, president, Food Marketing Support Services, Inc., Oak Park, IL, "How do you innovate in the context of an absolutely groaning supermarket?" For that matter, how do you come up with an idea out of whole cloth when, judging from the already crowded shelves, that bolt of cloth has reached its fag end?

You might try a hybridization technique that has nothing to do with genetic engineering: By crossing a familiar food or flavor concept into an unexpected category, manufacturers are creating products that are newer than the sum of their parts. A quick browse through the supermarket reveals a swelling wave of items that fit this pattern. Can't decide between cinnamon toast and cereal? Get the flavor of the former and the ease of the latter in one ready-to-eat product. Waxing nostalgic for s'mores? A toaster pastry gives you the chocolate, marshmallow and grahamy goodness, campfire optional.

So, whether heaping pizza into potato skins or spreading scrambled eggs atop a pizza, product developers are betting that consumers will buy into their strange ideation bedfellows. Unfortunately, the annals of product development hold more failures than successes, and when your creative strategy involves cross-fertilizing sometimes wildly divergent concepts, you don't always know whether you'll wind up with a masterpiece or a monster. By starting from a basis of consumer acceptability and manufacturing feasibility, however, you give your "hybrid vehicle" a chance to hit the ground running.

Even the wittiest hybrids are nothing more than a natural outgrowth of the creative process, Halperin believes. "If you're in charge of coming up with new ideas for products," he explains, "this is just one more way of arriving at them."

While some product developers may find inspiration for their concept crosses in analogies between existing products, Merry Jo Parker, president, Food Perspectives, Inc., Minneapolis, notes that it can also be a way of bringing together seemingly unrelated concepts. "And that helps inspire new thoughts and new concepts that perhaps weren't originally put together," she says.

Often, inspiration comes straight from the marketplace. Aaron Noveshen, founder, The Culinary Edge, San Francisco, mentions Domino's, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, as one company that has coped with a competitive environment by strategically merging concepts into the pizza category. Noticing the growth in sandwich sales, the franchise decided to lure sandwich partisans over to pizza. "And one approach the company took," he notes, "was to market the classic Philly-cheesesteak experience," but served open-face on a pizza crust. Consumers get the same mushrooms, onions, peppers and steak they expect from the sandwich, but on a "platform" that makes a welcome break from the submarine roll.

The pizza-sandwich merger is a logical move, but to court a jaded youth market, product developers need ideas with tongues planted more firmly in cheek. "The ones who really drive these crosses are the tweens," says Mike Bloom, president, Flavor & Fragrance Specialties, Mahwah, NJ. "They're the ones looking for the wacky, nutty combinations: the high-acid products, the high-impact flavors, the high heat."

Halperin has researched the youth market in depth, and his findings confirm that tweens and younger consumers "tend to be more experimental. So it makes a lot of sense that they'd be willing to try a translational concept that, to 40- or 50-year-olds, doesn't necessarily have a reason for being." After all, once you hit a certain age, chocolate-flavored french fries just don't have the charm they used to.

Paul Graffigna, vice president, marketing, Virginia Dare, Brooklyn, NY, isn't surprised to see concepts leaping "from one kid category to another. Take s'mores: It'll jump into a s'mores ice cream for kids, or maybe a cereal." Bubblegum is another kid-friendly concept ripe for importation. "You could see that in frozen desserts or beverages, or even in another confection-type product, like jelly beans," he says.Katz adds that, packaging innovations, particularly in kit-style products such as Oscar Mayer Lunchables(r), have allowed kiddie consumers to mix and match concepts on their own. "All you're really doing there is collating products, flavors and textures," he observes, and leaving it up to the kids to customize.

Once the youth demographic hits driving age, it'll be in the market for portable foods to eat during the commute, and product developers are already fitting sit-down concepts into handheld categories. Enter the convenient carrier - filled pastries, pocket breads, hand pies and burrito-style wraps among them. Granted, the carriers themselves aren't new. And, even when manipulated into trendy new colors or shapes, Halperin still considers that more of a "stepsibling" to the original than a full concept-category cross. However, "Where you do cross the line," he explains, "is when you start putting something like scrambled eggs into toast, and sealing that up into a pocket. Now you've moved from one category to another."

Dan Burrows, executive chef, national accounts, UBF Foodsolutions, Franklin Park, IL, cites handheld salads as another big trend. He's seen it at Tomatina, chef and cookbook author Michael Chiarello's fast-casual pizza chain, where the specialty is the piadine: a warm flatbread topped with a cold salad, folded and eaten sandwich-style. Even Burger King has made the salad-to-sandwich cross with its chicken Caesar club. "Handheld and healthful are really popular," he says. "So let's take something that's familiar - Caesar salad is the top-selling salad - and let's make it handheld and healthful."

Speaking of healthful, energy bars, "super" waters, meal-replacement beverages and high-protein items have fueled the functional-foods trend, but they've also forced product developers to devise innovative flavor systems to mask the fortification ingredients. "That's why there's a chocolate yogurt coating on your meal-replacement bar," Katz points out.

The remedy goes beyond a slick of compound coating. Functional bars and beverages get progressively closer to the candy store and malt shop as they enlist dessert-inspired concepts in a grab at palatability. Just look at the energy-bar category alone, Katz says: "There used to be either a fruit one or a peanut one. And now we have apple pie and lemon meringue and all kinds of crazy combinations."

A dose of dessert indulgence lightens up the energy-bar category's image, expanding its consumer base beyond the fitness-focused. If an energy bar emphasizes decadence over function, Halperin explains, it might attract a person who would otherwise never eat an energy bar, as well as enthusiasts who may also be interested in trying a variation on the theme.

Dessert and confectionery concepts are so successful at seducing customers that they've crossed into categories that don't even need the image or flavor boost - breakfast cereals, soft drinks and coffees, for example. Oreo(r) cookies, Dunkin' Donuts(r), and Reese's(r) peanut-butter cups all lend their decadent reputations to ready-to-eat cereals, and Stewart's Fountain Classics' Orange'n Cream soda lets you slurp the classic orange Creamsicle concept through a straw.

Take a look at your local Starbucks: Mocha coconut Frappuccino? Caramel macchiato? White-chocolate mocha? Bloom thinks that translating dessert concepts into coffee makes good sense, since java is a regular accompaniment to a dessert or a breakfast pastry. "When you have a cup of coffee, you'll have a piece of pie with it," he says. "And we've always gotten requests for things like coffee-cake flavor, but for the coffee itself. They just go together."

Product developers poach ideas from foodservice, too, where they've found plenty of viable concepts to cross and strategies for crossing them on restaurant menus. "Culinary is an art," Katz says. "Putting savory with sweet, putting a fruit base with meat - any of those combinations that we don't normally encounter on a day-to-day basis - many of them come out of the culinary institutes and the restaurant trade." Because a restaurant menu is flexible enough to evolve with the seasons, or even with the daily fluctuation in produce deliveries, chefs can indulge their creative whims and take chances on risky, edgy concepts, running them as nightly specials and keeping or dropping them depending on how they fly.

The introduction of cuisines and flavors courtesy of new immigrant groups gives product developers yet more grist for their concept-crossing mills. Notes Rodriguez, "You see dulce de leche everywhere ... and who even knew what dulce de leche was a few years ago?"Bloom predicts a boom in Asian-inspired crosses. He sees a day when Thai-spiced chip profiles, such as lemongrass-chile and coconut-lime, compete with barbecue and ranch. The smart money's on curry, too. "It's a natural complement to any chip product, corn or potato," he says. He's even tried wasabi-flavoured ice cream, and poses the possibility of wasabi-flavored lollipops angled to adults. "I don't think it's going to be mainstream, per se, but it's certainly innovative and there's going to be a segment of consumers who are going to want it," he explains.

While people are inarguably more willing to experiment with new cuisines and concepts in this global age, Halperin notes that you've still got to "step-change" them. "It's not because they're unsophisticated," he adds, "but rather because they are just uncomfortable with very large-scale, very rapid change." And so is management. (Risk-averse and impatient: Now there's a concept cross we could do without.)

Going out on a limb, however, may be necessary in the concept-crossing process. Rodriguez advises a strategic approach. "Solid, consumer-savvy organizations are looking for a signature," she observes. "Not an aberrant character that's not on-trend, but a signature: something that makes it special, but in a context of acceptability."

So you're wasting your time if you're crossing concepts for novelty's sake alone. Sure, you can stuff a pita pocket with tapioca pudding, but will your customers buy it? "For every concept you translate into a new category, ask if it's just a flashy idea, or if it really has some intrinsic worth," Halperin suggests. "Is it intriguing enough and does it taste good enough for consumers to buy it more than once, or is it just a gimmick?" Also, he emphasizes that consumers need some sort of "anchor" of familiarity in a new product - something they can relate to and recognize - "especially if the product is based on a translational idea," he says.

Easing consumers into concept crosses this way gives them the time and comfort they need to accept a new product. Perhaps that accounts for the success that the dulce de leche concept has had across the board: Underneath all the hype, it's just another take on caramel. "It's capitalized on a flavor that's basically acceptable to American tastes," Graffigna says.

Burrows puts it another way: "'Pomegranate molasses' isn't going to move a million dollars worth of product as a descriptor. So let's take something that's familiar to people, something that will sell - like apple pie - and let's do a different form of it."

According to Paulette Kerner, director, marketing and communications, Virginia Dare, "One of the reasons why this crossing trend is so popular right now, and why so many companies are doing it, is because there's a built-in probability of success."

But woe unto those who assume that if Concept A worked in Category X, it will earn similar high marks in Category Y. Halperin concedes that it certainly may expedite the process to translate successful products from one category into another, but, he says, "at the end of the day, you've still got to ask the same questions: Is this a good-tasting product, does it have a reason for being, and are consumers going to buy it more than once?"

You can't answer those questions without knowing your target market. "A food product will appeal differently to a mainstream consumer," Parker says, "than your upscale, leading-edge consumer."

Targeting a younger audience, on the other hand, involves a very different ideation mindset. Because children can be so absolute in their preferences, Parker recommends including them in the ideation process: "Adults need to see things from a kid's perspective. It isn't a matter of saying, 'Well, I think kids will like this,' because adults don't necessarily know what kids will like."

Not without testing, at least. "The only way to make these concept crosses successfully is to develop the product and show it to consumers and do qualitative research," Halperin concurs. "You may think that you've got the cleverest little pockets - you've got the scrambled eggs, and the sausage, and the maple syrup, and you're wrapping it up in this pocket, and you think, this is such a great idea, it's going to make our clients a fortune. But then you show it to consumers and they say, 'Why would I want to eat that?'" You're better off hearing the bad news now, while you can still go back to the drawing board.

That is, if the powers-that-be let you. Marv Rudolph, business director, DuPont Food Industry Solutions, Wilmington, DE, cautions product developers against prematurely testing hybrid concepts for that very reason. "Every product developer wants to get consumer reaction as soon as possible," he admits, "but you can't send out products that are not optimized." And if the reports come back that a protocept isn't living up to expectations, he warns that it reduces the chance of taking that idea out again because most companies won't spend money on things that they don't think will make it.

Even if consumers respond with enthusiasm, the good news is for naught if the final product bears fleeting resemblance to the protocept. "You've got to make sure that what you're developing is what the consumers told you they wanted," notes Parker. "Product developers have cost, ingredient or processing constraints that could result in a product that is different than the concept to which consumers responded. Any changes should be tested with consumers to ensure that the product fulfills the original concept." That means putting equal emphasis on approval from operations, management and the public.

How easily we forget our friends in operations, choosing instead to contemplate the possibilities of spaghetti-on-a-stick or pea-soup-in-a-pastry. But how do you wrap those noodles around the kebab? And what do you do when the pea soup leaks out of the pastry pocket? Because most innovative concept crosses are born in the heads of creative types and not on the factory floor, cross-functional teams must participate in every part of the process, Rodriguez says, if for no other reason than to bring those blue-sky ideas back down to earth.

Katz admonishes product developers to remember, "There is a technical side to all of this." The limits of existing technology, whether with respect to ingredients or unit operations, can abort a product's progress, especially if that project crosses concepts that have very different processing backgrounds. And one frequent parameter he notes is "no capital investment - it has to work on current, conventional unit operations."

But even seemingly simple flavor transfers compatible with existing equipment can get complicated. Say you're developing a pizza-flavored potato chip. That means contending with the production difficulties of flavoring powders so that they'll taste like a real pizza, says Halperin, "And then, when you sprinkle the flavor on the potato chips, you've got to make sure that the flavor of the chip itself doesn't overpower the notes of tomato, cheese and pepperoni."

You can't just hopscotch flavor systems from one medium to another, adds Dianne Casale, flavor chemist, Flavor & Fragrance Specialties. "The kind of system that you would give somebody for a beverage vs. an ice cream vs. a granola bar or a hard candy - they're all going to be different."

For example, a client requested a popular liquid eggnog flavor in spray-dried form from Bloom. He recalls, "They were telling us, 'I love your flavor in eggnog. I want my bakery product to taste exactly like that.' But there were monumental changes we had to implement in order to spray-dry that flavor so it worked in their finished product." Those changes could shift the flavor away from the ideal the client had in mind.

Just as current technology constrains in some ways, it liberates in others. The flavor industry's shift to offering comprehensive flavor profiles - the whole cinnamon-apple cheesecake instead of just cinnamon or apple - encourages product developers to import concepts wholesale from one category to another. Also, advances in coating technologies address moisture concerns that have kept high-water-activity concepts out of typically dry categories.

Even the equipment sitting right in front of us can be a font of inspiration, if we only see it differently. Katz remembers making bagels on a Rheon machine, and then taking advantage of the equipment's ability to insert a cream-cheese filling into the bagel itself. "Then we went to peanut butter and jelly, and then we went to a vegetable filling - a mushroom-type filling - and we just kept going and going and going."

"If you wanted to get a great education in food technology, go to the U.S. Patent Office's website," adds Rudolph. "It's amazing, the businesses you could start just with all those patents that have expired." And if transferring concepts across categories is the goal, why not transfer technologies across industries, as well? He notes that the same extrusion technology responsible for so many pastas, breakfast cereals and snacks came from the polymer industry. "The first person to put corn cones in an extruder - I'd guess it was way back in the '50s - must've been surprised when puffed corn curls came out the other end," he says.

The march of progress has brought us ever-more-sophisticated processing equipment, but no technology is as fine-tuned as the human sensory system. Unfortunately, that makes it more difficult for product developers to trick consumers into believing that there is, in fact, a Boston cream pie hiding in their lollipops, or a balsamic-roasted red onion in their cheese spread. As Halperin says, "Taste is an extremely complex thing. It's more than just the flavor, and that's why, a lot of times, you will see products that fail because they don't take that into account."

To pull off a concept-category cross convincingly, Rodriguez says, "The key is to understand the modalities of the product system that you're crossing over from, and those of the system you're working toward." That means translating the appearance, flavor, texture, aroma and, in some cases, even the hand-feel.

Say you're designing a blueberry-cheesecake Popsicle. "How heavy should this Popsicle be?" Rodriguez asks. "Maybe that's one of the key drivers of Popsicle sales - that people like them because they're lightweight." Aside from that, "You have to understand the impressions of eating a cheesecake: the sensation on the lips, the comfort on the palate and the coating that goes on during the first bite," she says. "You have to transition the whole cheesecake-eating experience to the Popsicle."

While we've got the flavor technology to replicate dairy, berry and graham notes, can we translate a granular crust texture or the dense smoothness of cream cheese into the Popsicle's language? "Some concepts are just more easily translated from one context to another," Graffigna says. And the more multifactorial the concept, the harder it is to recreate accurately.

The flavor industry hasn't yet developed an ingredient that can imitate crunchy or any other texture, for that matter. That may be the biggest obstacle product developers face in conveying a complete "eating experience" in a medium that doesn't share the same sensory modalities. Temperature comes into play, too. Cinnamon buns fresh from the oven can bring people to their knees, but will they have the same effect when chilled to ice-cream temperature? Conversely, does the crisp refreshment of mint get through in a product consumed at room temperature?

Sport and "ice" beverages already trick the senses with cooling agents, and capsaicin compounds can enhance the perception of heat in foods, as well (although perhaps not in a cinnamon-bun ice cream). On the textural front, Casale points out that the fat-slashing trend forced flavor technologists to develop systems that at least tried to mimic mouthfeel. "And even though a flavor ingredient isn't really a texture," she says, "it helps to give you the feeling that you've got something creamy or fatty in your mouth."

Bloom adds that by lengthening a flavor's residual time on the palate, "You absolutely can recreate some of that creamy mouthfeel."

Armed with the right technologies and tactics, product developers can better select the most amenable concepts and categories for cross-pollination. As mentioned earlier, energy bars work for dessert-inspired concepts - particularly bakery-based - perhaps because they themselves are a bakery-type of product. "So, if you're taking, say, an apple cobbler concept and trying to put that in an energy bar, you can make that work because you can add some fruit bits, and you've got that crunchy, cobbler-type sensation already," Graffigna says.

At first blush, a frozen dairy dessert might seem a dubious destination for bakery concepts such as apple pie or chocolate-fudge brownie. But as the current ice-cream selection attests, something must be going right during the transition. The à la mode factor helps: A big scoop of ice cream naturally goes with a slice of pie, cake or brownie, so why not incorporate those baked goods into the ice cream itself?

Much of the credit for making this concept cross effective belongs to ice-cream inclusions, which help solve the textural disconnects, Kerner says. Continuing a legacy that began with cookies-n-cream in the early 1980s and led to the sensation of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough versions almost 10 years later, the current crop of inclusions recreate everything from coconut custard pie to peach cobbler.

Graffigna describes a multifactorial frozen-dessert profile, a spicy-walnut raspberry streusel ice cream, his company built from natural and artificial cinnamon-nutmeg flavors, a natural walnut flavor, a raspberry variegate and pecan-streusel pieces. "So we basically reconstructed the spicy-walnut raspberry streusel in the ice cream," he says. The company has also developed surprising concepts for application in sorbets - for example, a creamy key-lime sorbet that communicates the concept's luscious overtones by way of a natural whipped-cream emulsion flavor and a key-lime ribbon.

The crosses Burrows has made within the soup category should be enough to inspire any product developer scratching his or her head for the next clever idea. Soup is a great choice for crossing, he notes, because it can go in almost any direction. "Is it comfort food we want? Then let's do a macaroni-and-cheese soup. Pizza soup? All right, start with a nice, tomato-vegetable type of broth. But let's add the oregano and chunks of pepperoni, and maybe add a little crouton or dumpling on there with some cheese grated on top. Boom. It's the same components, but just put in a different way," he explains.

Soup and sandwiches are longtime partners, and Burrows blended the two into one with a Reuben soup: a creamy broth with Swiss cheese, chunks of corned beef, sauerkraut and rye croutons as garnish. "We had a cheeseburger soup, too, made from a Cheddar-cheese broth with bits of ground beef, some chunks of tomato, and even a little ketchup and mustard seasoning and sautéed onion. When you ate it, it was like eating a liquid cheeseburger," he describes.

The exchange goes both ways. By analyzing what gives French onion soup its identity - "a rich, warm, beefy broth with those sweet, caramelized onions, the melted, browned cheese, and a crispy crouton on top" - Burrows was able to deconstruct the concept and rebuild it in the form of a sandwich. "So now I've got this rich, caramelized onion as a topping instead of floating in the soup. And then the beefy broth, instead of being a broth itself, could become a dipping sauce," as in an au jus for a classic French dip. "And you could keep that crispy, garlicky crouton, but that would be on the outside as the sandwich itself. And on the inside is provolone cheese. And to give it a little more beef flavor, you've got a little slice of tenderloin or roast beef in there."

Novelty for novelty's sake isn't the goal, but rather a novel twist on the original idea. Besides, product developers must have faith that consumers will suspend some disbelief when presented with a hybridized product. And if it tastes good and makes sensory sense, they will. "Is there culinary logic?" asks Noveshen. "We always ask that question about any dish that steps out of the mainstream: Is there a foundation in which these flavors can work with each other?"

Burrows agrees. "A lot of it comes back to basic culinary principles," he says. As a chef-instructor once told him in culinary school, "If scallops and blueberries were meant to go together, it would've been done thousands of years ago." So, if after stripping away the juxtaposed concepts and the categorical novelty, you've still got a product that strikes the senses as appealing - if you have a good balance of flavors that contrast and complement each other and work well together, he says - then you can afford to take risks.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a bachelor's degree in consumer food science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and enjoys cooking and eating food in addition to writing about it.