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Benilda
Moises starts her day taste-testing a violet liquid to
determine the right mix of citric acid and the sweetener
aspartarme.
“Most of
the time, the researcher would be the one to taste a
product with a single ingredient or a combination of
ingredients like aspartarme—which is 200 times sweeter
than sugar—and sucrose,” Moises explains.
Moises
is the director of Kraft Food Philippines Inc.’s
research and development facility and was part of the
team that created the mango-flavored Tang powdered juice
that’s now found on supermarket shelves across the
Asia-Pacific region.
“This
was developed here,” boasts Moises, pointing to a
red-yellow-orange 500-gram Tang package among a row of
several beverages displayed on a white table at the
company’s plant here.
It took
them a year, she says, from product concept development
to prototyping, before the Tang mango-flavored powdered
juice rolled out from Kraft Foods’ production lines in
the
Philippines,
Thailand and Indonesia.
“A lot
of science goes on in processing food,” Moises’s boss
and Kraft Foods R&D vice president James Andrade tells
BusinessMirror as President Arroyo was being toured
around the Kraft facility in Sucat, Parañaque.
“We look
at the natural and artificial flavors; the flavor
profiles. It all depends very much on what consumers are
looking for and we try to build the products based on
that,” Andrade, who holds a doctorate in Neuroscience
from Howard University, says at the inauguration of a
$1.5-million R&D facility that culinary and food
sciences go into each of their products.
Moises
later reveals that her team is looking at making a new
powdered drink that’s attuned to the Filipino taste.
While
there are brands and products that cut across countries,
Andrade says, “there are products that are unique only
to the Philippines or to the Chinese taste,” as we
tested a new bottled version of Tang, which is currently
being sold in China.
An
example of a global product is chocolate, which Kraft
manufactures only in Switzerland and exported to other
countries under the Toblerone brand name.
However,
Andrade points to the
Eden brand of cheese that is produced only in the
Philippines and which Moises’s team developed with the
addition of more sweeteners.
“Eden is
very different from the [cheese] slices we sell in
Australia,”
Andrade cites.
Launched
three years ago,
Eden is a pasteurized cheese spread made with buttermilk
and fortified with vitamin A palmitate, vitamin B1,
vitamin B2 and iodine.
“You
know Filipinos, they have a sweeter tooth than other
Asians, even when it comes to cheese,” Moises says.
Market-driven
Products
under development are tested using several methods from
“sensory evaluation” to targeting a select group of
consumers in a field test.
“We
don’t reengineer the taste or flavor; we don’t
manipulate the product just to suit the market,” Andrade
stresses. “It’s the market that dictates to us what our
product should be, for example, a busy housewife or
nutrition-sensitive people or health-conscious
individuals.”
According to Andrade, a lot of technology goes into
processed food, including seemingly simple items like
confectionery and biscuits.
For
instance, to create the Oreo wafer stick, Andrade
recalls they had to ensure that the chocolate stays
fresh and doesn’t melt in the hands of consumers.
“Unfortunately, the ambient temperature here exceeds the
maximum time for that chocolate not to melt. So, how do
we make a heat-resistant chocolate?” he says.
Andrade
adds, however, that not all products developed in
Kraft’s headquarters in Northfield, Illinois, could be
sold in Asia-Pacific, and vice-versa. He notes that
while most Kraft products sold in the region are
fortified with more iron, that’s less an issue in North
America.
The
commonality, however, is the need for convenience,
according to corporate and government affairs director
Tod Gimbel.
“We have
an ‘on-the-go’ market right now where most people want
something that they can put in their pockets or could
easily digest,” Gimbel explains.
That’s
where packaging comes in. Moises shows pocket-sized Eden
cheese slices packed in 50-gram packages. Likewise,
Kraft has also begun marketing cheese spreads under the
Cheez-Whiz brand packed in 20-gram sachets, just like
shampoos.
Moises
explains that these packaging modes came from the
company’s consumer studies that show that 60 percent of
sales come from the neighborhood retail or sari-sari
stores.
It takes
her team of food technologists a year or more “to
develop anything that is liquid, especially in finding
the right packaging,” she says.
Gimbel
tells BusinessMirror they would be building a separate
laboratory so as not to disrupt the regular production
cycle. “It would be good for all of us because equipment
need not be readjusted or refitted, and manufacturing
continues to meet target volumes,” Gimbel says. |
