Market validation through customer-focused sensory analysis of functional bakery goods

With growing market demand for healthy diet, more and more people are looking for easy-to use, healthy, and tasty bakery products. The pandemic had seen an increase in home baking with people desiring to bake their own bread and cakes. Sourdough is considered to be healthier and tastier than conventional bread due to long fermentation times. This bread must be made from scratch, requiring time and resources. A company has developed a ready-to-use dry multigrain sourdough bread mix using local ingredients that takes less time to prepare while still allowing consumers to have a home baking experience. A sugar-free cake mix was also formulated which could be used to make cakes, muffins, and cup cakes. This healthy high-fibre mix is a basic mix which has endless possibilities of making variations as per customers choice such as adding raspberry, blueberry, or chocolate. Market validation is needed to better understand the potential market demand and consumer requirements for the product attributes of these two products (e.g., flavor, texture, ingredient, price etc.). For the test, the mixes were home delivered to the interested participants. They had to bake the products, taste them and complete an online survey. The survey had questions on various aspects - demographics, product baking experience, taste and texture of product, liking, recommendation, consumption and purchase intent.