Participatory process diagnosis on pounded plantain-cassava product profile in Ivory Coast

The quality of local consumer products in West Africa depends on numerous parameters that enable them to meet consumer expectations. To increase the chances of adoption of new genotypes developed by breeders, it is necessary to increasingly deepen the identification of adoption criteria among users of these raw materials. Among the latter, processors play a key role because they are at the interface between raw material producers and consumers; they therefore need varieties that are highly processable while still producing finished products of the quality expected by consumers. This participatory assessment of the plantain and cassava processing process into Foutou (pounded dough product) aimed, through the processing of six contrasting varieties, to i) describe in detail the processing process, particularly the cooking and pounding steps; ii) compare the pounding ability of plantain varieties based on drudgery criteria; and iii) characterize the finished products based on one of their essential textural properties: their extensibility. In addition to a detailed description of the processing process, this study highlighted i) the importance of the dry matter content of the raw material, which must not be less than 30%; ii) the different pounding behaviors between varieties, with workloads that can vary by as much as twofold depending on the varieties used. This study enabled the development of new approaches to quantify the laboriousness of unit operations through video analysis. The first results presented here will need to be consolidated through additional studies on new genotypes while testing new participatory methods for describing the process of obtaining Foutou.