6.3.3 Other factors in designing the PD Process

Other factors to be considered in designing the PD Process framework for the company are: place in the food system, environment, technology, marketing and company resources.

Primary production, industrial and consumer food product development have differences in their PD Processes, which will be described in Chapter 7.

There may be strong societal and political constraints on product development that need to be included in the PD Process; obviously food regulations limit the processing and the raw materials, but religious requirements are also often important; or it can be recycling of packaging or other environmental problems. If these are not included in an early part of the PD Process, a great deal of time and money can be wasted.

Technology in processing, distribution and marketing has also to be considered - what is standard, what is new? (Earle and Earle, 2000). With the large multinational food companies, there is often a requirement for fast processing and large-scale equipment. This means that the product design, and the process development, start in the first stage of the PD Process with the consumer research, and then develop together.

In recent years there has been a great deal spoken about concurrent engineering in other industries (Tomiyama, 1998), developing the product and the production methods in parallel. In the food industry it is crucial that the product design and the process development are interwoven from early in product concept development and product design. For the smaller companies using simpler equipment, it can be possible to do a significant amount of product design on 'kitchen' size equipment before building up the process.