The “Sensory and Behaviour Sciences” facilities are utilized to bring into live the ambition to put our consumers (patients, HCPs, babies/todlers, caregivers, etc) at the heart of daily activities in the R&I organization.
So we ensure that the scientific concepts that we turn into products are not only nutritious but also appealing to our consumers / patients in terms of appearance, smell, taste and texture.
For ELN: We learned that milk powder appearance and preparation properties are very important to the mum/caretakers.
For AMN we believe that we can support patients on their sensory alterations due to their diseases by developing tailor-made products for specific diseases.
Besides sensory properties we also take into account packaging or patient and healthcare professional insights. We welcome here groups of mum’s/caretakers/patients or HCP to co-create with them and co-design future products for our portfolio to ensure relevance.
What you see here is “State of the Art”. We are proud to say that this lab can be considered as one of the most advanced of its kind in the whole world.
Why is sensory & behavior sciences important to us?
The mission of our sensory and behaviour science team is to lead the design of a meaningful and superior product experience for our consumers and patients. Greater appreciation contributes to better compliance, which in turn allows the patient to receive the full nutritional benefits.
ELN you can make the link between “we make every day count for your and your baby”, the large frequency of use and the superior products quality.
The facilities
The mirror room or “Ateliez” is suitable for sessions involving our target audience (expert descriptive panel, co-creation, focus groups, individual interviews). We have a monitoring system with cameras and mics connected to the control room and the kitchen. The room allows us to see the consumer reaction when tasting our product and listening to the conversation a product generates. Our development team are also able to respond on conversations by bringing in a new flavor on the spot e.g. when they overhear someone prefers strawberry over banana. Or behavior tests: Here you have a bottle, can you open it? It’s got to be user friendly.
Atelier is more used for our dedicated expert panels Not for co-creations. That is more often done now in the design kitchen. With the expert panels we have sessions each morning.
The individual test booths are for individual settings with a computer so you’re not influenced by your neighbour.
Water & creakers to clean the palate.
Odor neutralization on own skin (e.g. arn).
Carrots are used to neutralize texture.
The light can be used to neutralise colour (red) in cases when samples have different colours and you don’t want this to affect a panelist’s analysis of e.g. taste.
The Design Kitchen is a fairly new facility that was opened in February 2017.
The Design Kitchen is a place to prototype and co-create with consumers, patients, suppliers and Chefs, in order to get early feedback on our innovation concepts and products. The Design kitchen also allow us to observe and fully understand the experience of patients and consumers with products. As one example the sensory team invited PKU patients from around the world to get their feedback on product usage and taste.
Another example: we ask mums to prepare a baby bottle, so that we can see how our products are used in daily practice.
Mums invited to talk about their child that has milk allergies and how it impacts their family and meals. What are the wishes for the future on these type of products?
Design kitchen represents mums’ own kitchen. Products can be prepared and evaluated, children can be brought.
The kitchen has a spacious preparation area and a lounge allowing the best interaction between all participants.
The Design Kitchen combines classical cooking appliances that mimic the home environment of a real kitchen. It varies from standard kitchen materials (mixers, ovens, kitchen-aid robots) to advanced equipment such as a 3D-printer.
The Design Kitchen follows the HACCP for Hospital & Defense in order to maintain our Danone High Quality standards for our internal & external guests. (HACCP: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point is an international recognised system for reducing the risk of safety hazards in food. Cantines in hospital & military areas have the same rules in the Netherlands.
PS FYI only: we rather not explain yet how we use the 3D printer. In case you’re asked: Why do we have a 3D printer? “We are testing new technologies and exploring new business models.”
The panels
Our sensory and behavior team has 3 panels:
Internal test panel employees;
Voluntary panel of employees that focusses product/pack comparisons (difference testing, intensity testing). Mainly used for factory/ingredient changes, shelf life/aging of products. After a reformulation of a product we ask our people to evaluate a product compared to the previous one.(But not for likes/dislikes!!!)
Our internal panelists evaluate products approximately once 1-2 times a week a week.
An external panel (Sensory expert panel); we have 2 panels now 1 AMN/ 1 ELN. Dedicated medial and dedicated ELN panels that objectively describes the product properties and product differences. The expert panel gathers here twice per week/ELN 3 time a week to describe our products in development from a sensory perspective. This group consists of 13 people and these people represent a specific part of the populations which has a high ability to describe tastes, smells etc. We have selected and trained these 13 tasters from a population of 150.
Product profiles can be used for competitive mapping or catecoryriews, or understanding sensory properties of our new innovations.
Consumer / patient panels (only AMN), e.g. elderly or PKU patients, those able to visit us. However as not all patients can’t come to us we also go to them. we visit people and healthcare professionals around the world e.g. in elderly houses or in hospitals. Examples: improving the taste of Neocate Junior in the UK, or tasting Fortimel Advanced in elderly houses in Spain.