Fruit and Vegetable Quality

ity that the consumer (the customer) perceives as an advantage into new
products, expressed as listen to the voice of the customer.The term “cus-
tomer” is general and refers to customers in the whole chain from the
end user (the consumer), to the retailer, all the middlemen, the fruit or
vegetable grower, the seed supplier and, finally, the seed developer. In
this chapter the term “consumer” is used to distinguish the ultimate con-
sumer from other customers.
QFD originated in the Japanese shipbuilding industry in 1972 (Akao,
1990) and is closely related to the Japanese management philosophy
Total Quality Management. QFD spread from the shipbuilding industry
to the electronics and car industries in Japan, and later to a number of
other industries throughout the world. According to Hofmeister (1991),
it was adopted by the American food industry in 1987. QFD has been
described by Akao (1990), Mizuno and Akao (1994), Day (1993), Cohen
(1995), Urban and Hauser (1993), and Hofmeister (1991). Since prod-
uct development is usually a company-specific undertaking surrounded
by a high wall of secrecy, actual examples of the use of QFD in the de-
velopment of food products are few and far between (Bech et al., 1997a;
Bech et al., 1997b). Descriptions of and recommendations for the use
of QFD as well as examples to illustrate of the method are much more
frequent (e.g., Hofmeister, 1991; Charteris, 1993; Pedi and Mosta, 1993;
Swackhamer, 1995; Dalen, 1996).
QFD covers quality, technology, cost and reliability deployment
(Akao, 1990) and represents a relatively new approach to product de-
velopment in the food industry. First, it creates a common basis for the
development of new products; namely, an understanding of consumer
needs and wants, which are explicitly identified in the initial phase of
the product development process. Second, QFD provides a framework
for organizing information from different parts of the firm throughout
the product development process. Third, QFD links information from
consumers to the firm’s internal production processes and quality as-
surance systems. All information is collected in tables (matrices), which
can be seen consecutively, such that columns in the first table become
rows in the next, and so on. Finally, QFD is flexible, it can and should
be adapted to the individual project, team or firm (Mizuno and Akao,
1994). The use of the QFD model for product development means that
consumers’ needs are central throughout the product development
process, plus products are designed specifically to fulfil important needs
seen from the consumers’ point of view.
This differs from the more traditional product development process

200 HOUSE OF QUALITY—AN INTEGRATED VIEW