The Sensory Evaluation Center celebrates Yafei Li, a center student volunteer, who with her team won the 2nd place in the New Product Development Competition for Cornell Students sponsored by the Joh Foundation.
The 2021-2022 challenge was “Meat Alternatives for Flexitarians or Vegetarians”, and was highlighted in the Chronicle. Yafei and her team developed Veggieroni.
Yafei described the role of the Sensory Evaluation Center in the development of their product:
“I worked with four other Master of Food Science students on this project for about 5 months. The biggest challenge we encountered was to optimize the texture as well as minimize the off-flavor of the plant-based protein. We experienced a lot of setbacks, and we often had different opinions about our formulation. The sensory tests we did at the Cornell Sensory Evaluation Center helped us to get a better picture of consumer preference and to choose one formulation over the others.”
Congratulations to Yafei and the team!
Veggieroni Team: Yinan Huang, Yafei Li, Michelle Wu, Shuyi Wu, Xinyi Zhang and judges.
