PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen: 2 Big Lessons in Quality
Matt Gajda
Experienced Executive in Manufacturing, Engineering, Quality, and Operational Excellence
We enjoy watching cooking shows and one of our favorites is PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen. During the show, there is a section where they cook up several dishes and also a section where they taste test ingredients or prepared foods to determine which is best. Within these two sections of the show, there are big lessons in Quality and how to apply it.
#1 Big Lesson in Quality: During the ‘taste testing’ section of the show, Jack Bishop typically leads a taste testing. Jack does a really good job of gathering “Voice of the Customer” or VOC with the person who is doing the tasting. He does not lead the taster, but instead asks open ended questions like “What do like or dislike about that one” or “Why did you make that face”. VOC is very important as a first step in understanding what customers like or dislike about your product or service. Often times VOC literally involves listening to what customers say, but it can also involve observing how the customers use products or services which can often lead to identifying previously unmet needs.
#2 Big Lesson in Quality: For the cooking part of the show, several hosts prepare a recipe that has been previously created by the “Test Kitchen”, through trial and error, to determine the best recipe for a particular dish. While the hosts are making the dish they will comment on the many iterations the ‘Test Kitchen’ had to make in order to get to the optimum recipe. This could be handled much more efficiently and effectively if they would use the Taguchi Method of problem solving to determine what the optimum recipe is. Consider the following simple example of the power of Taguchi Methods if America’s Test Kitchen was trying to determine the optimum recipe for these elements of a recipe:
- Sugar Amount: 3 tablespoons, 5 tablespoons
- Oven Setting (degrees F): 300, 325, 350
- Time in oven: 60 minutes, 70 minutes, 80 minutes
- Amount of Milk: 8 ounces, 10 ounces, 12 ounces
- Number of Eggs: 2, 3, 4
- Amount of salt: ? teaspoon, ? teaspoon, 1 teaspoon
- Cocoa Powder: ? cup, ? cup, 1 cup
- Shortening Choice: Crisco, Butter, Vegetable Oil
This seems like a relatively simple set of choices to determine the best or optimum recipe, but this ‘simple’ set of choices results in 4,374 possible recipe combinations – way too many to test all of them. With Taguchi Methods, in as little as 18 ‘sets’ of recipes, the optimum recipe can be found which can save countless weeks or months of testing. And think of the time/cost savings if the recipe is even more complicated than this simple example.
Yeah, I know, I’m ruining cooking shows for the people who just like to watch them, but it’s hard to turn off the Quality part of my brain.