The Cornell’s Product Development Team (Michelle Duong, Belen Vila, Jiyu Zhu and Linran Wang) won the Grand Prize at IMPA’s 2016 competition for their product Yojito, a spin on a typical yogurt beverage.
Yojito is a nutritious and convenient snack high in protein boasting a unique fun factor: delicious mint-flavored popping boba. These small, popable spheres can be made from a vari
ety of fruit juices and flavors, and they remain sturdy until you decide to pop them in your mouth like a pocket of air on a sheet of bubble wrap. The popping boba are formed via a molecular gastronomy technique called spherification that’s more common to upscale restaurants than grocery aisles and transforms fruit-juice concentrate into caviar-like pearls. Inspired by the refreshing summer Mojito, Yojito is a combination of lime-flavored yogurt beverage with a mint-flavored popping boba.
“Popping bobas are new to most of the non-asian consumers and that was a big concern to us on the very beginning. A sensory analyses was inevitable since we wanted to test bobas acceptability among the possible customers”, said one of team members
In a first stage of the sensory analyses the team ran an affective test to analyze the overall liking of the product, test for different attributes of it and compare the likeliness of the beverage with and without boba. With the input of the sensory analyses the product was reformulated.
**Photos by Alex Solla Photography
In a second stage, a focus group was conducted in order to optimize the overall liking of the product by trying the same yogurt beverage with different concentrations of the boba (1 to 4% mint extract). The winning concentration of the boba that optimized the overall liking of Yojito was 1.5% Mint extract.
“This was a great experience and we will really like to thank Cornell Sensory Evaluation Center for helping us being the winners of the IMPA’s Grand Prize”
Congratulations to Belen Vila, Michelle Duong, Jiyu Zhu & Linran Wang!
For more information about this competition, please visit the competition sponsors, United Dairymen of Idaho, or click on the link below.
http://idahodairy.com/press-releases/cornell_impa/
Also, see Cornell Chronicle article about the team:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/08/student-developed-drink-yojito-pops-national-competition
