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FAPC highlights food and agricultural research during symposiumOklahoma Oklahoma State University's Robert M. Kerr Food and Agricultural Products Center, together with the Institute of Food Technology-Oklahoma section, held the 10th annual FAPC/IFT-OK Research Symposium on Feb. 16 to highlight food and agricultural products research conducted by FAPC and other OSU researchers. "The event provided an opportunity for graduate students to make oral and poster presentations of their work and for researchers to network with others in the food and agricultural field and possibly foster future collaborations among colleagues," said Peter Muriana, Ph.D., FAPC food microbiologist and chair of the symposium. The event began with keynote speaker Tony Mata, Ph.D., of Mata and Associates, who gave a presentation on "Research Meats Reality: Challenges of New Product Development." "I am a 'meat geek,'" Mata said. "I'm here to talk about the challenges of collecting research and taking it to the plant and sharing my experiences of this crazy new product development." Mata defined "meat geek" as "a person who is narrow-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits and has a ridiculous obsession for all things meat." Mata explained that new products have a high failure rate, no more than five percent make it from the bench to the market and no more than 10 percent succeed in the market place. However, he gave examples of successful new products, such as Lunchables, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, chicken wings, chicken nuggets, rotisserie chicken, Hot Pockets, fajitas and flat iron steak. Mata pointed out that all of these products possess at least one of the attributes or characteristics of new products, which include a true new offering, convenience breakthrough and quality breakthrough. Although developing new products is a challenging endeavor, Mata suggested some practices to help avoid disaster: a skeptic champion is essential, address the toughest make-or-break questions first, celebrate killing projects because it's a numbers game, always push for single endless raw material, always conduct an autopsy of products that fail and don't be too proud to be "second best."
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