“…200 years is long enough…” or what makes a good product developer !
Every time I was asked to talk about what makes a good product developer I would either start or end with a clip from this great food film “The 100 Foot Journey”. The young chef working in the kitchen of a French Michelin start restaurant “dares” to experiment with a two hundred year old recipe…
There is no such thing as a sacred cow, or for that mater a sacred recipe. A product developer needs to be a lot of things, passionate, knowledgeable, skilful, hard working… but if they are not curious and experimental, then that great tasting multi million pound new product, will stay forever illusive.
I love that scene. If nothing else, it make me feel better every time my experimentation would yield unpalatable results (yes, there were some over the years, it happens to us all). “At least now I know!” was my standard line.
The rest of the film is very good, too. It is the story of a young Indian cook and his family that move to France for a better life and open a restaurant across the road from a Micheline start French restaurant in a small town . The two very different styles of cooking and dining clash at first, or rather the people clash until misconceptions and biases are disproven and the simple truth that Indian and French cuisine, each wonderful in its own right, can coexist and so can the people.
I do think that they have missed a trick though by not publishing a book with the recipes.
#ProductDevelopment #FoodFilms #FoodTechnology
A product developer needs to be a lot of things, passionate, knowledgeable, skilful, hard working… but if they are not curious and experimental, then that great tasting multi million pound new product, will stay forever illusive.
"It's Only Biscuits..." 