Joy from food: why we taste our products every week

Every week the whole Color of Vietnam team sits down and eats its own products. Not new samples, but the products already on the shelf, eaten the way a customer would eat them. This session is different from a sample review. Nothing passes or fails, and there is no spec sheet on the table. It exists for two reasons. First, food is the reason this company exists, and the joy of food is easy to forget when a week is spent looking at spreadsheets. Second, eating your own products regularly is the cheapest way to stay honest. This piece describes how the weekly tasting works and where it keeps us honest.

How it differs from a sample review

A sample review is where decisions are made about a product in development. The weekly tasting is where the team eats what is already being sold. Three things are different:

• The product: real stock taken from the warehouse or bought back from a shop, in its original pack, from a batch currently in circulation.
• The way of eating: in the customer's situation, not according to a scoring sheet.
• The outcome: a page of notes and perhaps one question for the partner facility, never a pass or fail verdict.

The tasting is kept short and fixed on one afternoon a week, so even a busy colleague can drop in for fifteen minutes. Newcomers are invited from their first week, because it is the fastest way to learn how the twenty products across four brands differ.

Eating the way a customer eats

The way you taste matters more than people expect. An energy bar tasted at a meeting table, cut into small pieces, next to a glass of water, gives one impression. The same bar eaten at ten in the morning when you are hungry, unwrapped in a hurry on the way somewhere, eaten whole, gives another. Customers eat it the second way. So each week we choose one product and one situation:

• A PLAY Nutrition bar: eaten whole in the middle of the morning, not cut, no water on the side, to learn whether it is too sweet or too dry when eaten the way a customer does.
• A PLAY Protein Bar: eaten after a workout, when the mouth is dry, to see whether it sticks to the teeth or is hard to swallow.
• A Natural & Healthy bar: eaten with morning coffee, to check whether the roasted cashew flavour still comes through next to the bitterness.
• Let's PLAY rice crackers and snacks: a pouch or jar opened between a few people and shared, to see whether anyone reaches for a second piece and whether the jar is easy to pass around.

After eating, each person writes three lines: what is different from last time, what made them happy, what made them pause. Three lines are enough to compare one week with the next.

Three places where the tasting keeps us honest

Honest about flavour. When you eat real stock every week, nobody trusts a scoring sheet more than the feeling of wanting a second bite. A product that meets every specification but that nobody on the team wants to keep eating has a problem, and the tasting is where that problem shows up early.

Honest about batches. Products are made in batches at our partner facilities, and one batch can drift slightly from the one before. Eating regularly is the earliest way to notice, before a customer does. When we find a difference, we note the batch code and send a short question to the partner facility so they can check it against the production record.

Honest about why we do this work. A week can be all price lists, certificate files and packaging print schedules. At the tasting, the team sits together and talks about food. That reminds us why we do this, and it reminds us through flavour rather than words.

A recent tasting

That week we chose the on-the-move situation for a PLAY Nutrition bar. Each person took one bar, walked out to buy a coffee, and unwrapped and ate it on the way back. The notes converged on two points. First, the bar worked well eaten whole: the sweetness was right and nobody needed water. Second, the pack tore easily along the marked line, but crumbs from both ends of the bar fell away while walking, far more than when sitting down. Nobody had seen crumbs at the meeting table. The follow-up was one question for the partner facility about the pressing at both ends of the bar, and one note for the next packaging review about the tear line.

No big conclusion. But an observation like that only appears when you eat the way a customer eats.

Why this is culture rather than process

We could write the tasting up as a procedure with forms and an owner. We deliberately do not. The weekly tasting is where the value Taste First is lived every week, and it only lives if people come because they want to eat together, not because they were assigned. Three lines of notes are enough. The joy is the rest.

If an afternoon spent eating snacks and talking about flavour with colleagues sounds like a good day's work to you, take a look at the two open roles on our Careers page. We will invite you to eat with us in your first week.