Need section

Design Brief

Design and make ready prepared sweet canapés suitable to serve as finger food at drinks parties. They should be suitable for storage in a chillier cabinet in a supermarket. The canapé must be suitable for all ages, hand held and mass produced.  

Reasons for choice of design brief

After visiting the local supermarkets I found that there are no sweet canapés available to buy in the chillier cabinets, they’re only available to buy frozen. The sweet canapés I did find were very original and old fashioned such as ‘Mini sweet pastry slices’ and ‘Mini jam doughnuts’. I found no sweet canapés in the supermarkets that had a cake mixture base or meringue base. All the sweet canapés I found were very similar, and they didn’t contain a variety of ingredients. All the canapés I found looked insipid and didn’t look appetising or appealing to the eye as they didn’t contain much colour such as fresh fruit. The canapés I found were mainly creamy; there wasn’t any fruity or chocolaty canapés available. They didn’t contain many luxury ingredients such as nuts fruit and alcohol that would add to the flavour, texture and appearance of the product. I found very few sweet canapés even after looking in the freezer section of the supermarkets; I did find cakes such as ‘Mr Kippling Apple pies’ but they were too big to be served as canapés. I asked in the local supermarket Tesco why there weren’t many sweet canapés and the sales adviser told me that a wider variety of sweet canapés are only sold at Christmas as more people entertain at Christmas. Although the supermarkets didn’t sell sweet canapés they sell a small selection of savoury canapés all year round in both the chillier section and the freezer section.

After talking to the target market group, I gathered that they never buy canapés from the supermarkets as they’re very plain and not the quality that they want to be eating and or serving at drinks parties. They said that there’s a great need for high quality canapés in supermarkets as in this day and age people like to entertain all year round rather than just at Christmas. The target market group said that there are many sweet canapés available at Christmas but they stop after the Christmas season. As most of the target market group are working adults or full time parents they don’t have time to make canapés to serve when they have friends round, so they end up just having ‘nibbles’. Most of the women said they wanted high quality up market canapés that they can serve at their drinks parties. They suggested that the types of canapés should be varied and should contain a wide variety of base mixtures such as different types of pastry, meringue and cake mixtures. The target market group said that they’d like to see sweet canapés with luxurious ingredients such as alcohol and fruit; they’d like them to contain luxurious ingredients because they’re more appetising and appealing. The target audience would also like the sweet canapés to contain fruit to make them healthy and provide them with one of their five a day.

Research to be done