© Blackwell Science Ltd. 2001 Food Service Technology, 1, pp. 103–118 103 Learning from the competition through category appraisal: one practitioner’s keys to faster and more efficient product development ronments of 30 to 40 years ago. One needs only to read business newspapers to see the effects of this competi- tion. Out-of-home meal consumption continues to increase, but with that trend comes massive competi- tion among those who service this consumption. The demand for out-of-home food, whether to bring back to the house or to consume on the premises, fosters a burgeoning and highly competitive foodservice indus- try ready to satisfy customer demand. The use of variety in many ways as a competitive edge (individual dishes, lines of items, periodic themes), coupled with the customer’s search for variety and innate quality means that despite being a satisfied customer on one occasion, the same customer is likely to go to differ- ent restaurants some time later. As a consequence of this variety-offering market strategy and this variety- seeking customer behavior, it is inevitable that no single restaurant chain can ever hope to keep the same cus- tomer coming back time after time. Variety-seeking, and the tendency to become bored with the same food and the same ambience, time after time, is only one of several contributing factors that lead a customer to change restaurants. Unfortunately, variety-seeking is the one built-in factor, hard wired to the nature of the customer, and something that has to be dealt with by strategies that cost a great deal of money and involve different food items, different restaurant concepts (see Peer review Correspondence: Howard Moskowitz, Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. &. i-Novation Inc., 1025 Westchester Avenue, White Plains, New York, 10604, USA. Tel: 914 421 7400; E-mail: hrm@mji- designlab.com Keywords: category appraisal, competitive analysis, liking, segmentation, sensory attribute Abstract This paper presents a data-based approach to jump-starting the development process. The approach, category appraisal, obtains ratings from products in the competitive frame. Here, that competitive frame is soft-serve ice cream. Data from consumer ratings of liking and sensory attributes enable the researcher to determine how well products perform, what sensory attributes ‘drive’ overall liking, and what sensory levels and landmark products correspond to newly identified market opportunities. These opportunities may consist of a highly acceptable product, a product with spe- cific sensory attributes, or image attributes, or even some combination thereof. Introduction Knowledge-based product development is important in the foodservice industry. Such development uses infor- mation obtained from consumers in order to direct the creation of products that satisfy the customers. No longer can foodservice managers remain content simply with the dictates of an expert who, single-handedly, identifies what the customer trend will be and creates the product designed to capture that trend. The com- petitive environment now rewards fact-based decision- making. There are three major causes underlying the adop- tion of such knowledge: business and customer searches for variety, corporate need for speed in devel- opment, and the economic punishment for errors in development and marketing. Variety It is instructive to understand the history of fact-based decision making in product development. Today’s envi- ronment is a great deal more competitive than the envi- Howard Moskowitz Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. &. i-Novation Inc., 1025 Westchester Avenue, White Plains, New York, 10604, USA Dr Moskowitz is writing a special series of articles for Food Service Technology; this is the second in the series.