Who is Black Sheep Foods?

Black Sheep Food’s mission is to bring consumers delicious, sustainable, plant-based meat products while reducing the destructive environmental impacts of the meat industry. They created the world’s first plant-based lamb and are challenging themselves to be even more innovative. 

Currently all plant-based meat products on the market are grounded, however, BSF wants to create structured plant-based products. Rather than starting with the science, they want to understand meat-eating consumers' purchasing behavior, eating experiences, and sensory evaluation of steak to engineer the “perfect bite”.

What I did

As the sole user/consumer experience researcher, I had full autonomy over the direction of this research project. I planned, designed, and conducted all aspects of the research independently with a human-centered approach. My role as a CX researcher included:

• Formulating research questions

• Selecting research methods

• Recruiting survey + interview participants

• Designing a survey

• Creating questions for consumers interviews and expert consultation

• Interviewing five meat-eating consumers and one culinary expert

• Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data 

• Writing a consumer experience research report detailing insights and a framework for the engineering and design of product. 

• Communicating to stakeholders, CEO, Marketing, and Chemistry team insights and project trajectory

Research Aim

How might we understand what consumers value most about their experience of cooking and eating structured steak?

• How might we utilize these consumer insights for the product development of plant-based structured meat?

Methodology

Key Insights

1. Purchase behavior of steak is largely influenced by intrinsic cues in quality perception such as visible fat (including both internal fat (marbling) and external fat), meat color and appearance.

2. Tenderness, flavor, and juiciness are the main quality attributes that consumers use to assess the quality of steak.

3. Average consumers find it difficult to cook steak to their desired liking. Their lack of confidence and experience result in them typically over cooking steak.

4. The perfect bite of steak has juxtaposition in the mouthfeel: a crunchy, seared-like exterior with a tender and soft mouth feel.

5. The cooking behavior of steak not only influences, but is also core component of a consumer’s steak eating experience.

Analyzed five sensory analysis literature papers

50 Respondents

Conducted 5 consumer interviews

Consulted with one expert chef

Product Recommendation and Direction

Cooking-Friendliness: 

1. Average steak-eating consumers don’t know how to correctly cook steak to their desired liking; and if they do, they are not confident in their ability to do so. In addition, sanitation concerns of eating undercooked meat lead consumers to over cook steak, resulting in an unenjoyable steak eating experience. I recommended that BSF designs their plant-based meat to be cooking-friendly ensuring that the product is cooked correctly to create a juicy, and tender eating sensation. Potential solutions include:

   1. Visual stamp on the product that arises when cooking is complete on one side. 

   2. Package design that has intuitive and standardized cooking instructions.

Juxtaposition in the mouth: crunchy exterior, soft interior 

1. Evaluation of sensory analysis via a hedonic scale questionnaire illustrated that consumers seek a crunchy, seared-like exterior with a soft, flavorful, and juicy interior. I recommended that the science teams focus on engineering a product that sears around the circumference of the meat while cooking.

Check out the full written research report!