Things to Remember

Let us stop the development process for a moment and reflect on a few things that you need to remember when developing your food product.

Hygiene and your Food Control Plan

When working with food products you need a food control plan. This is a plan to identify, control, manage and eliminate or minimize hazards for the purpose of producing safe food. If you have other staff working alongside you, this means that they must all comply with the requirements of the food control plan.

What does this mean for you personally?

• When you do work with a team of staff both you and the staff need to adhere to personal hygiene rules.
• You must be able to identify critical food safety points and plan to address them.
• Record cooking temperatures for food especially if working with chicken and reheated food. You must take and record corrective action if the cooking temperature is not above that identified in the Food Control Plan.
• Clean and sanitise kitchen stations and workstations before working.
• You must clean and sanitise all equipment so that equipment does not contaminate other foods.

Culinary skills

When preparing any food product, you need to have the culinary skills. This is to ensure that not only is the product correctly produced but that it scientifically meets the required standards.

Equipment and facilities

Do not forget to check that you have the required equipment and facilities to produce your product. If you need to invest in certain pieces of equipment, make sure by doing a financial forecast that you will make enough sales to cover the investment in the product, in other words will the product give you a return on the investment.

Business skills

Launching a product requires you to develop a strategy, this is similar to a business plan and includes information such as your target market, how you will market your product, how much you will price your product at and so on. Do you have the required business skills?

Financial resources

Launching a product takes money. You may need new operating equipment, stock items, designs for packaging and all these take money.

Activity

Do an assessment of what resources you will need to produce your product, whether you have them and if not, how you will acquire them. Please share your findings with other learners on the course with you.