Nighttime Soothy
A soothing drink with added melatonin to help unwind and fall asleep.
In the fall of 2017 I took a Food Ingredient Product Development course at North Carolina State University. The class was split up into teams and our assignment was to create a new food product in twelve weeks.
Create a new food or a drink that provides an experience for the consumers and can help them fall asleep at night.
User Research, Facilitation, Package Design.
Discovery
We started with the very broad concept of “filling the open space on the nightstand,” that currently is not filled by many products on the market. To identify the potential consumers and find out what they prefer in a nighttime sleep product we developed and distributed a survey to 1000 NCSU (North Carolina State University) staff members, as well as distributed it to family and friends on Facebook.
Some of the questions we wanted to answer:
Who are the potential users?
Who has trouble falling asleep the most?
What do people prefer to consume before going to bed?
The results of the survey were filtered to the respondents consuming foods or beverage before bed more than four times a week.
Following our survey, we conducted market research by performing a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
Ideation
Mining through data and creating personas
We created two personas based on the survey data that we acquired from the 394 individuals.
Description: 24-year-old female graduate student, lives in Raleigh.
Behavior: Often stressed about her busy schedule, eats an irregular diet
Needs: Unwind at night , a nutritious snack before bed, cares about staying on a budget
Lisa
Description: 28-year-old female, has a 3 years old daughter, lives in Raleigh, works at a startup.
Behavior: Works full time, likes yoga, prioritizes nutrition over price, drinks tea before bed.
Needs: A food to indulge in before going to sleep that doesn't take too long to prepare.
Sarah
I used the Big Ideas method from IBM's design thinking method cards deck to come up with product ideas. Then we clustered similar ideas together and voted for the ideas that seemed to be the most promising. We paired our findings with the market research.
The outcome of our ideation session was a floral/fruit horchata that would include either lavender or cranberry flavor.
Making
Testing Prototypes
Based on the users needs and market trends we identified five recipes we were going to test first. We started with a traditional horchata recipe and modified it to include ingredients that contained melatonin or precursors to melatonin.
To get immediate feedback we made samples and gave them out to people walking by. We asked them to rate the drinks by giving us a number from 0-10 for the overall liking.
We eliminated the first few prototypes, because people didn’t like the sour taste of the cranberry and cherry juices. We developed formulations that could be considered for the final product. Since the design process is human-centered we needed to test our formulations in a facilitated focus group.
Focus Group
Getting feedback early on
During the focus group session, we first presented our concept statement and asked our participants to rate how much they liked our idea. We then went through a script and had each one of the users taste the different samples and answer more questions.
We used the Feedback Grid, an IBM design thinking method, and analyzed data from the focus group.
The overall observations were that, participants liked the banana flavor but preferred the texture of the lavender water based horchata. Participants recommended to reduce sweetness intensity and try other sweeteners. Finally everyone thought the lavender was too strong and had a soapy taste.
Looking at the feedback it was clear that the focus group preferred the banana flavor . The liking scores rated the banana flavor the highest as well. But this is where the challenge arose. Some of the group members insisted we take out the banana flavor because it is a "Walmart flavor," without providing adequate data to support their reasoning.
What we should have done is pre-commit to the outcomes of the results before holding a focus group. We should have decided to move forward with the recipe that had the highest score from the focus group. Learn more about pre-comitting here.
Reiterating
Testing more prototypes
We still had to optimize our recipe, perform futher market research, and also design the product prototype. To help us work through the time constainrs we created a task list.
We worked on optimizing the lavender and sugar levels of the drink. Since we had no more time to hold another focus group, we used the other students or employees that were working in the same kitchen lab. We got immediate feedback on our product as we systematically changed the concentrations.
With a few days to go we finally had our recipe and we were excited to share it with the classmates and also various food science professionals that came to watch our presentation.
Package Design
Final step
It was important to follow regulations to make the package design but also invoke the feeling of relaxation when the customer would see the label. I created the package design and recieved positive feedback from the food company representatives.
“This group had an excellent package design that reflected the fact that
food products are an experience, not just foods for nutrition and satiety.
You are clearly here trying to sell an experience: soothing beverage to lull
you to sleep. The colors and photo evoke this quite well, as does the
name obviously. The gentlemen evaluating your oral presentation were
quite impressed with the professionalism of the marketing pitch.”
