Market orientation and cuisine innovation as a driven sensory methodology to develop a sweet potato snack as an added-value food product

Nowadays, there is an increasing interest in developing novel products that include ingredients that nourish and contribute to health. These food products need to possess unique sensory features that can differentiate them from existing ones, moreover considering that culinary creativity becomes an important part of the process of food product development. In this study, sweet potato (SP) was used as the main functional ingredient. This product is rich in bioactive compounds. However, this new product should be based on what consumers are looking for. For this purpose, a survey of 15 questions was conducted on 276 people in a local market from Aguascalientes, Mexico. The objective was to understand the use of SP and the expectations of new products with this ingredient. Results revealed that 26.45% of the surveyed people had never consumed SP and 54.71% of them like to consume stewed SP. Interestingly, 30.43% of the consumers would like to consume SP as a snack. As a result, cuisine professionals and innovators from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico, developed SP chips prepared with SP flour (36.86%), rice puree (40.86%), grasshopper powder (18%), salt (1.43%), sodium bicarbonate (1.88%) and sugar (0.94%). The process consisted of mixing, dehydrating, and insufflating stages. When the product was obtained, a sensory questionnaire was applied to consumers (n = 100), which consisted of an acceptability, a JAR, and a CATA test. The acceptability of the chip was 7.45 ± 2.25 on a 10-point basis. The consumers (82%) of them had never tried a value-added product made out of SP. The attributes considered significant by JAR are low in sweetness, sweet potato flavor and bread flavor; but high in salt, mouthfeel and flavor. In the CATA questionnaire, a list of 10 attributes was applied to individuals that were asked to endorse any relevant term which characterized the sample; from which, the ones that are relevant (α ≤ 0.05) are: spicy flavor, mouthfeel, sweet potato present, and mouth sensation. It was shown that the process of incorporating SP, rice and grasshoppers in a snack value-added product was promising.