One of the images or graphics that I like to share with people when we talk about safety of food products goes back many years now. And in North Dakota, 12 people died from consumption of a home canned product.  So it's very important to think about safety along with developing something that tastes great. So that's a very important thing to remember. So with this particular presentation then, I will highlight some of the product development basics. We're not going to of course cover everything. We actually teach a product development class on campus that we have that runs for a whole semester. So it's tough to cover everything in a short amount of time. I also will talk about sensory evaluation. Sensory evaluation is really addresses the question, do people really like my product? That's what sensory is there to do, is to provide you some feedback using samples that you've prepared to see do they really like that product you've just created. Sensory evaluation is also referred to by some people as taste testing. So if you hear taste testing and sensory evaluation, they're essentially the same terminology. I will just give you a very quick overview of food safety issues and a refresher. Talk a little bit about the basis for recipes and then finish off with where do I find information and recognize that with some of this it's just going to be a brief direction as to where you can find information. Not necessarily a detailed discussion of where to get every piece of information. In a few weeks you will be hearing a talk about the cottage food laws. So I really won't talk anything about that today because I feel it's going to be covered in two weeks. So to get started then on product development it's important to understand first what is the real definition of product development and what's important is that this is a process. So it's a process where we create this concept and we convert this concept into a food product that can then be sold at the marketplace. So it's really again a process. So to understand that process will give you a better outcome when it comes to selling of your particular product. So one of the important parts about product development is this concept of a market assessment. And this is really where you want to begin because oftentimes we think that we make something at home. Your family loves it. Let me package it and sell it. The issue is that maybe it's not really what people want because there's already a certain number of products on the market. They already have a favorite one they consume all the time. So really then it's again important to think about what is it that products, what products are out there that people want or what products are not out there that people want. So you have to think kind of both directions that there might be something that's only one product on the market exists and people want more options or it might be something completely not even on the market that people are actually wanting. To give you some data with regards to commercial food production from large food corporations, for example, some statistics show that 72% of the new product, so 72% of these new introductions fail within three years. So the failure rate, some companies say one year, others say three years. But when we talk about new products, these are products that are the first time entry into the market maybe or a product we define as a Me Too product where there's already something like that out there and you're just kind of duplicating that product, that's considered a new product. In that case, again, high percent of failure, 72%. The other types of failures deal with line extensions and line extensions are essentially products that already exist and you're just adding a new flavor. A good example of a line extension would be like sometimes you see products like rice aroni where you have one flavor and then they can't come out with another flavor the next year or potato chips like lays potato chips where you have one chip flavor and then they come out with a new chip flavor the next year. That's kind of a line extension. So again, as expected, we would see that the line extensions fail less often than new products. So again, if you're thinking about creating a product, this is something that you want to be aware of is this a product that people are actually wanting. The other part of market assessment and these are just a couple of ideas. I mean there are other options out there but these are two things that at least at a minimum you should be thinking about. The second one here is referred to as a SWOT analysis, a strength, weakness, opportunity and threat. I'll cover this in a little bit more detail for you but just recognizing that you want to have a product idea that has more strength than weaknesses and you want that product also to have more opportunity than threats and so that's the kind of the general idea is that you want to have something that has more strengths and opportunities than weaknesses and threats. When we start to look at SWOT there's a couple of very simple questions that you can address without really starting to do any surveys. In a product development class that we have our students oftentimes will do a Facebook survey to get information so that might be something that that even you could do a Facebook survey or something very similar. A few of the questions then that that you want to start to think about because that can help you address that SWOT analysis and the first question here deals with the primary customer. So who are the primary customers of your product? Are you looking at a specific age group, a certain economic background? Are you going to rely on tradition like certain people eat lefse and are you going to rely on the tradition of eating that that product as something that's going to be important to you and help you sell your product? The other important aspect is there a unique niche, a certain type of flavor that's not on the market, a certain type of berry that might be just native to North Dakota and that you can make a product with it and you know you would have a niche type of product. The second question here is what products are you competing against in the marketplace? And for most people they think of consumer packaged products but could your product actually go into a food service? Maybe your local you know a local company might say yes I would like this and then our company will sell it to somebody else so that would be another another path. So think about who are you competing with in your particular example. Also another important question to address is could this product be a direct competitor or some other product or an indirect competitor? A direct competitor is product versus product. There are basically two products that are the same type say we'll say salsa for example so you have salsa A and salsa B that is a direct competitor in that environment. Is that who you're challenging is basically that type of product or are you doing more of this indirect product introduction where your product meets the needs to replace another. For example for for diabetics jams and jellies can be an issue and so can you create a jam or jelly for someone with diabetes and so it's a case where you're replacing that traditional jam or jelly with with this diabetic version or a version that the diabetic patient can consume. The next question here why should someone buy your product so what are your selling points or the selling points of your product because that that is important to know and that's very important when you start to combine your SWAD analysis because you are looking at at a case is it more nutritious is it convenient you can make it cheaper so therefore the cost is going to be lower does it have a certain sensory or flavor that's that's different and that's going to be what sells your product versus some other other product and then finally how are you going to make your product and what are your major challenges for your product. Do you have the necessary equipment or do you have to buy equipment remember that equipment's going to add cost to that that product and so again it's important to identify that early on. Do you have the necessary ingredients or are those ingredients available to you and are the cost efficient for you so if they're cost prohibitive then maybe you have to find different ingredients and it might not create the same type of product so again ingredient availability ingredient costs are really always important factors if you're growing your own vegetables you're going to make a salsa based product that's going to be a cheaper more available product to you than if you you go to a grocery store go to a wholesaler it's going to cost a little bit more then the shelf life of your product you're making this product does it have to be consumed within three weeks or can it sit on the shelf after it's been processed for a year and still be good so it's it's important to define define that and then finally do you have the processing experience you need to to understand the processing aspects of that that product and again with this particular situation it might be that you need to ask people so in some cases you might have to hire somebody that that has that experience to help you you through the the process of making that product so let's just use an example and to do follow through with SWOT analysis and one of the things that I highlight here and this could apply to any any food item this is a the idea here is a frozen italian soup bowls so all you really are so the person's interest in making this soup bowl now we're really making is is the italian bread and then we're going to cut out the top and hollow out the the bread part of that bowl and so we're taking that product then and we're going to freeze it and so we're going to have these frozen italian soup bowls that we want to sell so in this particular case then we're we're basically going to be looking at strengths so the strength of this product could be that you're making these pre-made soup bowls that can be removed from the freezer you just throw it in the oven and bake it and then you fill that with the soup that you've you've made so that would be a strength there would be convenience just pulling out that that soup bowl you don't have to make the dough you don't have to bake the bread you don't have to cut it out you don't have to fill it up so so your product is going to be something that's they just pull out of the freezer throw in the oven to to warm it up and then throw in the appropriate soup so that's kind of the the product that we're intended to make a weakness though could be that you have competitors in that the local grocery store has a bakery aisle and in that bakery aisle they already make soup bowls so if the person's interested in a soup bowl they would have to they could just stop by the store and pick it up and take it home and throw in their soup and and they have one so so the idea here is to look at a strength versus a weakness and we could pull out many other strengths and weaknesses but I'm just going to highlight two just for the sake of of time opportunity you know is there an opportunity there well if there's nothing if there's nothing on the market that exists like this then you know there's opportunity there especially if it's a frozen one that you can you can pull out and then finally the threat the threat would be that that basically there would be a competitor already making a product like this or that this would be only a short term product in the sense that maybe from a December through February time period where maybe more people eat soup less people eat maybe a soup bowl those times so a threat might be just a short term time of the year that would would be successful so that's kind of your SWAT analysis and you want to you want to basically kind of go through that exercise just to kind of see how will your your product kind of stand out versus potential competitors um there is one question I should address here the question is any suggestion tips to to conduct a shelf life study on a product at home how long will my barbecue sauce last after it has been opened so so in this particular case one of the things that I oftentimes tell people is that that you want to have some people that you feel can really evaluate your product for you in the sense that they can tell you that they sense um if you're using brown sugar in that recipe or you use it honey in there and they can tell you that oh I kind of have this taste of honey in the barbecue sauce and it's something that that they like and so they could pick that out for you and so what you oftentimes could then ask those people to come in and say hey can you taste this product and see do you pick up those notes that you did when you first open the product or you first made a batch of that product so that is one approach that you would have in terms of of a shelf life typically um with barbecue sauces we oftentimes want to um we want to try to use it up uh you know a 14 days uh to 30 days oftentimes we recommend just for the sake of freshness um oftentimes in a refrigerator because you're under acid environments and you're in refrigerated temperatures um that usually helps uh preserve some of that that product a little bit longer so it's important that when you you talk about shelf life oftentimes with some of these products it's more an issue of just quality changes that that happened um so so with that we'll kind of move on and and at the end if there's other questions around that I will uh can talk a little bit more in detail so what I want to do now is move into um I want to move into um how do I know my product is the best and that's uh one thing that's very important when we we address this particular question we rely on sensory science to do that and sensory science is a scientific method used to evoke measure analyze and interpret those responses to products as perceived through the sense of sight smell touch taste and hearing so that's kind of the the definition that's been out there for you know almost 30 years now um but the idea here is that we we get a response uh from people tasting a particular product and that's the the whole goal of of a sensory science what's very important to remember with sensory science is that there are multiple uh there are multiple uh techniques that are available um however it's it's once you get to the point of of going to consumers we start to look at at preference we start to evaluate acceptance also referred to as liking so these are our our tests that we oftentimes will do but what's very important here is to get objective opinions uh one of the important uh things to remember is that you know sometimes your your kids uh your husband or wife uh your mom or dad maybe these aren't necessarily the best people to collect scientific information on because they may not always be 100 honest with you um so it's important to understand that you want this objective opinion so people that you don't you know they could be people that you know but you would trust that they would give you an honest answer to the evaluation of that product so in this particular case um again preference and acceptance or liking are the two tests that we oftentimes will do because they're specifically targeted for consumer type of data collection uh so the first thing here would be a preference uh so in a preference testing uh we use what we define as a paired comparison test or a ranking so those are the two tests we commonly do in a paired comparison test you're just simply comparing two products um and these two products are are fed to the the sensory panelist and then they're asked basically just a circle we're right on in the in the the line here uh what product they prefer okay so it's just a they prefer one sample over another that's all that they are are doing in this particular situation when it comes to a ranking test a ranking test involves involves four samples or three samples so it's usually more than two so so three three or more in this particular case then you ask them to evaluate the product and they would rank the products from one to four in terms of how how much they prefer the the particular set of samples um again this this is a very simple test it's designed for consumers uh so it's not not a very complicated approach but at the end of this study it's very important to that you know what we are allowed to say about this product and the first one here is that it indicates product is preferred that's all it does it says that this product is preferred over the the other so there is no um there is no information about whether or not the panelists actually like the product it just tells us that they prefer that product uh it also allows us to measure the relative order of preference between several samples so in that ranking test we had four samples it would tell us a relative order it doesn't quantify that that preference because we're just asking them to rank it from one to four in terms of of which products they prefer so that's the disadvantage to this is we get a qualitative assessments and not a really quantitative set of data but it also done properly can allow you to do an ad claim about your product in the 70s and 80s there is always a lot of commercials where coca pepsi were doing taste tests and and uh one would say that theirs product was preferred over another but the one thing that I do want to caution you about is that if you want to make an ad claim you have to have the sensory done at a third party so the third party has to actually do the sensory evaluation and and they would then provide information back to you about what product was preferred uh so um I just want to caution you again that that with preference you can use it an ad claim provided that that a third party lab or sensory laboratory would actually do the test in acceptance acceptance now gives us an indication of liking uh we oftentimes will use hedonic scaling hedonic scaling is is um designed to give you a sense of the liking or the level of liking of your product um hedonic scales there's uh word hedonic scales and they range from like extremely down to dislike extremely uh so if you have a product that's on this disliking side of the scale you know that there's an issue you probably have to change the formulation however if you're up at like extremely like very much then you know that hey people really uh do like the product and so um hedonic scaling is nice because you get these differences here uh it's also adaptable so you can use what we define as facial hedonic scales so you have uh boys and girls and and they all understand that if you have happy hearts and stuff they understand that that would indicate they really like it but if they have thumbs down that means they don't like it or it's dislike it extensively so the nice thing about hedonic scales they are adaptable to your audience of interest uh just keep in mind that you're not going to use a facial hedonic scale for a teenager uh for a middle schooler high schooler even even adult so it's not something that you would you would use for that population but if you have six to ten year olds six to eleven year olds in that range they'd probably work on that population the other type of of testing is a just right and just right is oftentimes referred to as an optimizing technique um it it has this implied uh acceptance to it um your goal in in a product formulation is to to hit the just right uh part of the scale because that means that that your panelists say that a specific attribute such as gravy color is just right it's not too light it's not too dark but it's just right so that implies that there's some sort of liking in there the amount of vegetables you know too few versus too many and then there's a point where there's just right so the idea behind a just right is that it's more of an optimizing allows you to change your formulation um during that development stage so if you if you put a lot of vegetables in there and people tell you there's way too many vegetables then you would reformulate to cut back and then hope the next time that maybe they hit just right so um again just recognizing with with preference tells us only preference acceptance is more of the liking um type of of scale it also allows for more of the optimization so there's a little advantages a little bit more advantage is to go on with the acceptance testing then than preference what can we say then at the end of this test we can basically indicate the degree of product liking is it extremely like is it extremely disliked we get a relative order of acceptance between samples so if you have two three four samples you get a relative order in terms of of how much they like that product um in the just right the nice uh thing about the just right scale um and we oftentimes use this early on in the the process development is because we want to uh identify your best formulation and so yeah formulations and recipe changes that might be needed this particular type of scaling is is um very useful because it allows you to do that so it gives you what we define as actionable information so i mentioned too many vegetables well your action then is to reduce the amount of vegetables in that product so that's um essentially um how to think about these particular types of sensory tests so with that that introductory to uh the product development side of of things to think about i want to move into the food safety refresher and i will not spend much time um um covering a lot of details here i've i've done that in previous webinars um but before i get into this i see i have a question uh how many panelists do you have uh for sensory evaluation on a product and with with the just about right so when i do the just about right scale i'm typically around 10 to 15 panelists because it's just easier to manage 10 or 15 panelists or 10 10 or 15 people that can evaluate your product also what what oftentimes is helpful is is that you get the same panelists to to evaluate after every change if you can so so that way it's a little bit more more uh easier to manage when you're down with 10 or 15 plus you get you get a lot of good information with that that number of panelists when you get into acceptance testing or preference testing so you have a finished product and you're going to run acceptance or preference testing then you want to be up to that that 50 to 100 range is is typically the minimum that we we suggest if you you can do that so so that's the kind of that range that that we oftentimes will do some of the larger manufacturers they go up to 200 panelists oftentimes but but i have found that that for a lot of the work that we have done in the past when you're right around that that 75 mark it seems to be a good number of panelists that give you good information and and something that's represents really that that product that's being evaluated so again 50 would definitely be the bare minimum there 100 would be ideal but you don't have to go to that two or 300 at some other large corporations would go to so let me jump back then to the the food safety refresher keep in mind that the FDA they really classify food into three three classes or categories they have a low acid this would be a pH greater than 4.6 an acid food is one that is naturally acidic so it has naturally a pH of less than four points less than or equal to 4.6 so it's a case where where again i want to stress the word natural so if you pick it off a tree or you pick it off a bush and it has a pH that's 4.6 or less that's a natural naturally acidic and then acidified is the third category and the pH here would be less than or equal to 4.6 by the addition of acid so that's really the important thing to remember is that it's an acid addition that that makes it acidic in nature so just again some examples here we have fruits such as berries and apples fermented products such as sauerkraut and pickles these are considered acid foods and and so you can look on this little image here and you can see that the majority of your fruits fall in this particular category the majority of your berries probably fall in this this category as well again with with sauerkraut and pickles it's very important that that during that fermentation the pH drops to sufficiently acid conditions to make it an acid food so again it's always important to understand what is the acid of my my sauerkraut what is the acid of my pickles if i'm doing a fermentation a low acid is basically all vegetables so all your vegetables you just basically assume that they are going to be low acid also i want to be you to be very much aware that some of the fruits like the melons the water melons in particular they are not acid so melons, cantaloupe, honeydew these are not acid in nature they're fall in that low acid category so it's very important to understand that just because we classify them as a fruit from a market perspective it may not necessarily be low acid so don't don't assume that all fruits are acid it's important to know the difference and then meat products fall in this low acid environment we also then have a acidified food and this is any food that is sufficient has sufficient acid and your acids could be lemon juice vinegar citric acid these are ones that would be added that would make that product have an equilibrium pH of 4.6 or less and an equilibrium pH is one where the solid particles in that food has the same pH as the liquid portions so you can't just take a pH probe into your salsa and say oh yes my salsa is 3.8 for pH but then you you separate out the onions or peppers in there and you grind these up with a little distilled water and you take the pH and now you see oh wait a minute it's it's not 3.8 it's 4.9 so it's it's very important to understand that an equilibrium pH means that that every material in there is at the same pH level and and that's again very important parameter to remember so when we look at at processing products some of the basis for recipes that you would see that are on the USDA guidelines are very much dependent on the nature of that product so always remember that anything that is an acid food or acidified food a boiling water bath canner is is generally going to be the way that you would process that with pressure canning pressure canning you have a low acid food or mixtures of of acid and low acid so it's not really necessarily being acidified it's just that you have some some tomatoes in there and maybe you're you're putting um maybe some some apples in there some applesauce along with your tomatoes but then you have some peppers and um um onions and other components that you are adding to that mixture and so in that particular case it's a mixture of the two so you're not necessarily then adding acid to it so you're not acidifying it so it's important to remember that when we talk about mixtures of acid and low acid it may not necessarily be acidified it but but in that particular case when they are a mixture you really need to do pressure canning what's also very important to understand is that there's really low acid canned food products are very highly regulated in the sense that you have to show a lot of data before you can submit products to the the public and so basically home canned products just cannot be sold publicly just because of the the nature of that that product um and and why is that so why all this concern about the the recipe and and how to process it it goes again back to what I had showed you earlier with that that family that number of people died in it and and essentially what they died from was a botulism and botulism is a result of clustering botulinum this is an organism that produces a toxin that is one of the deadliest ones that we know of one milligram can kill 655 tons of mice so we're not saying 655 mice we're we're saying 655 tons of mice and so of course one milligram is is a lot but at the same time 655 tons of mice is a lot also foods can contain toxin without show and sign so you can't look at and say oh there's botulism toxin in that um keep in mind that there is an antitoxin available but it still results in a slow recovery and sometimes permanent nerve damage results so again it's it's a concern that we would have because again this toxin can kill people and it's done by suffocation because it paralyzes the the diaphragm so your lungs don't work correctly and so what happens oftentimes then is that clustering botulinum organisms will germinate and once it germinates it into a bacterium so it's in a spore form that spore then germinates into a bacterium once this bacterium is growing it multiplies and one of the products that results from this during this growth phase is a waste material of course but more importantly the toxin so you have to have live organisms there to produce these toxins and so if that organism has some point in time is is uh growing that toxin might be in that particular product what's very important to remember though is that in order for this particular sport to germinate and grow into a biacterium it needs to have anaerobic environments so usually less than 2 oxygen it has low acid requirements so pH is greater than 4.6 a temperature of storage of 40 to 120 Fahrenheit and then finally uh relatively high moisture content so if you eliminate any one of those conditions you're reducing your chance of this particular organism organism being present what's very important also to remember that these spores we consume these spores all the time so they're in the environment so anytime you eat a vegetable you might be eating a spore but the the issue here is is that that spore is inert it doesn't cause you any harm it's only when that spore germinates into the live bacteria that is when the problems arise because that bacteria produces this toxin okay and in a product that you might that such as a green pea where you might just put it in a salad of some sort you're not necessarily doing a heat treatment on that that pea and so if that toxin is present there is that possibility that you could get botulism from that so again this organism is really the main concern with the canning industry just because it is so deadly so where do I start then if you're interested in making a home can product you know you need to identify first the product that you're interested in selling so that's the first step if you'd go through that the first part of the presentation that I highlighted and say okay yeah this is the product that I actually want to make then you ask does the product meet the FDA definition of acid or acidified food if the answer is no if this is a hermetically sealed high water activity food so a canned product for example or something in a jar that is not eligible for processing at home for commercial sale okay so that's that low acid environment however if you say yes it isn't acidified food you can process that at home for commercial sales if it's following the FDA definition of acidify or acid food all right find your USDA approved recipes I'll give you additional information later and then identify the function and pH of the ingredient because that allows you to get a better sense of if I had a certain ingredient is that going to make my product more or less acidic and so that's an important thing to to think about as you're doing product formulations just a quick overview here on pH of ingredients you know we talked about fruits you know we look at apples apples have a pH anywhere from approximately 3.1 up to 4.0 so it's it's important to understand that what product are you going to use in your your fortification are you using an apple juice an apple sauce or are you using a certain type of of apple you know it's important just to get a sense of of what product you're actually evaluating the other ingredients are common ingredients that you might have would be butter cornstarch corn syrup flour honey molasses sugar vinegar and as you can see here that when you add a cornstarch that could dramatically increase the pH of your product because cornstarch itself is has a pH of 7 typically and so the idea here would be that that you are very much aware of what the pH of those ingredients are this particular slide just shows you again and I want you to think you know as you as you get done with the seminar now just kind of go back and look at this list but the role of ingredients fruits and vegetables of course they're the flavor they're the texture the color fruits are acid vegetables are low acid sugar sugar is its primary role is as a as a flavoring but it also is a preservative so sugar acts as a preservative because under the right environment a high sugar not many things can grow in that especially some of those pathogenic organisms so but the issue here is that it's low acid so if you're adding sugar to your recipe keep in mind that it might change the pH to be in less acid in nature so very similar to sugar there's it's a flavoring it acts as a preservative but again it's a low acid ingredient some other other products we would have corn starch that's a texture of viscosity that's low acid we have pectin which provides texture so in jams and jelly that particular product gives that structure firmness to that jam or jelly it's can be low acid to acid because it depending on what type you get calcium chloride calcium chloride enhances firmness of price especially like dill pickles this is a low acid product lemon juice vinegar provides acidity and flavor that's in that acid category and then finally citric acid is just gives acidity and tartness but that's acidic in nature from a pH perspective and then the last set here we have corn syrup it's a considered low acid honey is actually a considered acidic again purpose for sweetness and then spices and herbs they enhance flavor but they are low acid so when you have your formulation I want you to create a spreadsheet basically of the ingredients give what is their function in that product and then what is a pH of that product because by understanding that you kind of understand why is it that you're putting that in the product and how it might ultimately affect the pH and so I have an example here where when you look at apple chutney you have your your apples apples give your texture they provide flavor they provide acid that particular pH of that basically prepared apple is going to be between 3.2 and 3.55 so you have a case where acid in nature however when you look at a chopped onion it's there primarily for flavor but the problem is it's it's low acid a bell pepper there for flavoring it again is is low acid and so as you work your way through the list it's important just to understand then what is a pH of these products because when a recipe is approved they look at you know the functionality look at the pH and then you have an overall pH and if if you're still on that low acid side of the pH scale you know you might have to add more vinegar to that formulation or add citric acid to that recipe so again it's important to understand functionality of your ingredients and how that might adjust your your pH so where do I go to get food safe recipes the first thing and first site I recommend going to is the national center for home food preservation they have a number of of documents here to read through but there are some that are very specific to what you might want to produce or a product that would be similar so again take a look at that particular website because again it provides it provides information about the USDA guidelines we also have the NDSU extension part and and with that Julie highlighted this particular website last week again this is a food preservation site so you have a lot of good information about canning and freezing and drying you know my discussions so far have been on canning but you might have other products that you're interested so again here's another set of a nice website for you to look at some recipes and formulations also ball canning it's actually freshpreserving.com is really what the web address is but it takes you to ball blue book and and there's a number of formulations in there and products that you can make it's very easy to use they have a section on recipes so you can take a look at these recipes and say okay these are this is something that I want to make it's a case where you know some things have already been done so you may not have to reinvent the wheel on certain things so so again these are food safe recipes that that you know has curr and ball have really created a site with that in mind that it's these are our safe products to make. What happens if I don't want to necessarily sell a can product? What's very important to understand then is that you still want to look at your your your ingredients and identify what are some of the functionalities of of those ingredients keep in mind that organisms tend not to grow as easily in acid environments compared to a low acid environments so so they tend not to grow as easily in acid environments so in our particular Mexican beans and in corn salad and this is an NDSU extension service salad a couple of things that are important you have the vinegar so you have red wine vinegar you have lime juice both of these actually can acidify with lime juice being more acidic of course but they can both acidify that of course wine vinegar adds some flavor to it but but again that helps to acidify that that particular salad what's very important to remember though is that as you're developing these types of formulas check with the the department of health the food and lodging for guidance because they might have some some rules retail outlets might have additional rules so it's important to to check that out this would be another example of an old-fashioned potato salad and this is again a NDSU formulation or recipe that that again is safe and so when you see these recipes just think of think of the the the time they had spent to make sure it it it meets the appropriate conditions for for that sale of that product so they're not going to can this in a can this type of product but it could be sold to a daily possibly also then some additional information can be found at government website so the state the state is is always a good site because the health department specifically the food and lodging department of the food and lodging really has guidance for for health inspections and and and some some of the laws and rules required for processing extension services I just highlight a UC Davis file here I've already provided you some for NDSU then at the federal level we have USDA and and FDA where I always recommend people just kind of scan the FDA and look for acid and acidified foods and see all the information that's readily available for you and then commercial websites such as ball corporation freshpreserving.com that is a site that I oftentimes recommend to people I may not necessarily recommend other commercial sites but but this is one I feel like they've invested a lot of time in history in in canning and then again some learning modules so again on the food nutrition site at at under the food entrepreneurship there's some learning modules that that could also help give you some some good information so again on some of our our chat box here just keep in mind that the extension counties or offices oftentimes have poster displays of of safe canning they also have stuff posted on their websites with with recipes and so forth and and I think that that's important to look at one of the questions here is is please comment on options for us on hot fill versus boiling water for sealing acidified foods for food entrepreneurs I always tell people that the safest route is the the boiling water bath method one of the issues that that you oftentimes can happen with with hot fill products is not getting the appropriate seal so I think that that one would be one concerned whereas if it was in boiling water bath you wouldn't necessarily have to worry about that of course you would you would always want to make sure you see that vacuum being created but generally I'll even let Julie pop in if she has any comments about the hot fill products but but the oftentimes have to be very hot to fill and in a lot of hot fill products that are on the the market oftentimes you know can reach 135 degrees Celsius which is really extremely hot so with that if if Julie wants to say anything please feel free I see that Julie said her microphone doesn't work but you can contact me later so it's uh I would suggest on that hot fill it's probably I'd have to look for for more information for you I don't have it top of my head but but maybe Julie can comment on the text box if she can so um Susanna has mentioned that the universe of Wisconsin has a fact sheet so I think it's important just to double check with if it's going to be a price sold in in North Dakota just check with the health department that's the I think the first first step of that process so with that I see I got about a minute left if you have any other last minute questions otherwise I think Julie will be posting this and you can always come back and listen to it for a second time so


In this video, I'm going to give a broad conceptual overview of the Lucene Tech Search Library and I'll introduce basic use of its API. Lucene is a kind of information retrieval system, or IR system for short. An IR system offers search capability over a body of information, most commonly textual information, such as in a web search service like Google Search. An IR system collects a corpus of information, usually in units called documents, and processes these documents to construct an index, some kind of data structure that allows the corpus of documents to be searched relatively quickly. Without indexing, an IR system would have to perform searches by brute force, by reading through potentially every single piece of information in its corpus, and that obviously would be really slow when the corpus is more than trivial in size. Web search, for example, would be totally impractical if it had to rely upon the brute force approach. The core building block of text search in most information retrieval systems is what's called an inverted index, or sometimes called a postings file. An inverted index is some kind of collection that allows us to quickly look up a specific term and its associated postings list, a list of the numeric IDs of documents which contain that term. So, for example, if the term pizza is present in some of the documents in our corpus, the inverted index allows us to quickly access a list of IDs for those documents. Note that the documents themselves are not stored in the inverted index, and so must be stored elsewhere if we need to access them. How documents are stored and retrieved by their ID numbers is a separate problem. So, the inverted index is basically just a big map in which terms are associated with lists of document IDs. The important question then is what exactly is a term? You might naively answer that each word in a document is a term, but text is generally more complicated than that. What about punctuation? What about numbers? What about variations in spelling? Do we care about capitalization? Should we emit very common words like the? Should words with common roots really be separate terms? Should the plural cats match the singular cat? Depending upon exactly what search behavior we desire and what performance and storage use trade-offs we're willing to make, we'll have different answers to these questions. Ideally, users would be able to perform any kind of search query on an index very quickly, but this isn't always feasible. For example, sometimes when doing a web search, I want to find documents matching an exact sequence of characters, punctuation included, and only that sequence of characters. But for the sake of performance and limiting storage use, web search services like Google emit most punctuation marks when they index web pages, so such searches simply can't be done on their indexes. The process of selecting terms from a document is called analysis, and the core part of analysis is tokenization, in which we split our document text into substrings. Each substring, along with its position, character offset, and length, makes up an individual token. For example, if we tokenize the text Queen Victoria by simply splitting along white space, the first token is Queen at position 0 because it's the first token, offset 0 because its first character is the first character in the whole text, and with length 5 because Queen has 5 characters. The second token would be Victoria at position 1 because it's the second token, offset 6 because its first character is the seventh character in the whole text, and with length 8 because Victoria has 8 characters. Once we have a document broken down into a bunch of tokens, we can index it such that each unique token string becomes a term. Now if we wish to perform queries which depend not just upon which documents contain which terms, but which also depend upon where the terms are located in those documents and how frequently, then we must also retain each token's position and offset information in the index. The postings list would then look something like this. For each occurrence of the term, we record the position and character offset. Here we have two occurrences, the fourth token in the text, which starts at the 21st character, and the 26th token in the text, which starts at the 198th character. You may wonder why we didn't include the token length. First, few types of queries need this length information, and second, the token length can generally just be inferred from the matching term. When we look up the postings list for the term pizza, the matching tokens should all be of length 5. However, this is not always the case because analysis might convert text snippets that don't exactly match pizza into pizza. For example, an analyzer that admits punctuation marks would convert both PIZZ%A and PIN$ at symbol Z exclamation mark ZA to pizza. So, depending upon our search needs and our analysis, we might include token lengths or we might not. That actually covers the essence of building an index. Obviously, though, the actual implementation of indexing requires great concern with the precise index data structures because the details dictate how efficiently we can look up the terms in their associated postings lists, which is a very good reason why you'll probably want to use an existing solution like Lucene. Getting all those details right can be very tricky and take a lot of work. In any case, once we have our index, we can perform queries on it of several different kinds. The most obvious kind is a term query in which we look up all documents containing an exactly matching term. For example, if we perform a term query for cat, we get back all document IDs in the postings list for the term cat and just cat. Our results should not include the postings of any other term, whether cat, catalog, catamaran or dog, just cat, CAT, the full term character for character. Be clear, however, that again, depending upon our analysis, the term cat and the index might represent tokens in the documents that don't exactly match cat. The idea of a term query, however, is that whatever terms end up in our index, a term query does a precise match for one of those terms. A wildcard query allows us to look up partial term matches by denoting fill-in-the-blank sections of our terms. By convention, these fill-in-the-blank sections are denoted with an asterisk character. For example, a wildcard search for f asterisk t asterisk er will match any term that begins with f, includes a t in the middle, and ends in er, such as father, fatter, fighter, or freighter. The query cat asterisk will match cat, cat, catalog, and catamaran. The query asterisk cat will match cat, fat cat, scat, and copycat. Unfortunately, the algorithms that find wildcard matches are relatively costly, and so they are disfavored or disallowed in many search systems. However, finding old terms beginning with a sequence of characters, a prefix query, like cat asterisk, can generally be handled as a special case with a much more efficient algorithm. The same cannot be said of finding old terms ending with a sequence of characters, a suffix query, like asterisk cat. To look up all the terms with a particular suffix, you're stuck using the same inefficient algorithm for the general case of a wildcard query. The idea of a fuzzy query is that we want to find inexact matches of a term by specifying the degree of inexactitude to allow. This inexactitude, this level of mismatch, is measured by the degree of difference in character edits. For example, the difference between pizza and pizza with 1z is 1 character edit, the removal of a z. So if we perform a fuzzy query for the term cat and allow for two character edits, the query will match terms like cat, pat, path, bat, bath, act, catty, cape, cod, cod, zap, and so forth, because all these terms have two character edits difference from cat. The great thing about fuzzy searches is that they accommodate typos and misspellings. The downside is that like wildcard searches, fuzzy searches are generally much more costly to perform than searches for exact term matches. If we record term positions in our index, we can also perform phrase queries. A phrase query is a query in which we match on multiple terms occurring in a certain order or within a certain proximity of each other. Most commonly, phrase queries are used to find a specific sequence of adjacent terms. For example, we could perform a phrase query for the terms George and Washington adjacent to each other and in that order, such that a query will return the documents that contain the whole phrase George Washington, not just George and Washington separately, or in the opposite order. A range query matches all terms that fall within a numeric or alphabetic range. For example, we can search for all numbers from 100 to 200, which would match 130, 174, 120, etc. If we search for the range apple to orange, it would match all terms that fall alphabetically in between as they would in a dictionary, such as banana, fire truck, or obtuse. Optionally, we can make a range query inclusive, such that say a range search on apple to orange would also match the terms apple and orange themselves. Whether a range query can be performed with reasonable efficiency depends upon both the breadth of the queried range and how exactly the index data is structured. In Lucene, while range queries are certainly less efficient than simple term queries, they are still fairly efficient. Lastly, a Boolean query composites multiple other queries together, combining their results into one result set. The reason we call it the Boolean query, instead of just a composite query, is that we can use Boolean logic to include or exclude matching documents of each subquery. For example, a Boolean query could match all documents from one subquery, but exclude all documents from another subquery, so we could find, say, all documents which have the term cat, but which also do not have the term dog. So that about covers the possibilities for how we might query index to find a set of documents, but we're missing a vital aspect of most search applications. Finding a set of matching documents is only one half the problem. The other half is to sort those matching documents generally with the best matches sorted to the top. A web search query, for example, typically matches thousands if not millions of web pages, and so a web search would be virtually worthless without sorting of the best, most relevant matches to the first page or two of results. This sorting process is often called scoring because each matching document in the query result set is evaluated and given a score, with the best matches given the highest scores. In a typical application that offers search, search results are presented in descending order of score with only the top 20 or 30 matches shown, unless the user requests to see more. There are many ways to go about scoring documents as different search applications call for different approaches. Perhaps the most common approach, though, and the default offered in Lucene, is the vector space model using TF IDF weights. When described formally in terms of vectors and cosines, the model sounds complicated, but the TF IDF part is actually easy to understand. TF stands for term frequency as in how many times a particular term appears in a document. DF stands for document frequency, meaning the percentage of documents which contain that particular term. The I stands for inverse, so IDF is the total number of documents divided by the number of documents containing the term. The idea of TF IDF weighting is that intuitively, higher term frequency should result in a higher score because a document with many occurrences of a query term is a better match than documents with fewer occurrences. Likewise, higher document frequency of a term should result in a lower score because the more common the query term is found in other documents, the less special any particular document with that term. By lowering the scores for common terms, we give stronger weight to uncommon terms and appropriately return low scores for documents which match only common terms. If I perform, say, a web search for a common English word like car, even the top results should have low scores to reflect their likely low relevance. So to get a document score with TF IDF weighting, we simply divide TF by DF. As term frequency goes up, the score goes up proportionally, but as document frequency goes up, the score goes down proportionally. Usually, however, this formula is expressed as term frequency multiplied by the inverse document frequency, which of course is the mathematical equivalent. I'm not certain why we multiply inverse document frequency instead of divide document frequency, but this is the convention. If I had to guess at the reason I'd say it's because multiplication is generally a faster operation for computers and therefore this makes queries faster to score. Again, TF IDF certainly isn't the only basis for scoring, but it's the most commonly useful. Depending on your application, you may wish to incorporate different factors. Google, for example, owes most of its early success to PageRank, a system that scores web pages based on how commonly that page is linked by other web pages. Google's scoring system has evolved greatly since its early days, but PageRank is still an important factor.