A predominant ingredient in the Orient is fish – used both fresh and comminuted as surimi fish mince.
Made
for centuries by the Japanese and thought to date as far back as
1100AD, surimi is now spreading from Japanese to Western processed foods
and is used to form extruded, shaped or cooked simulated shell-fish
meat products such as crab, lobster, scallop or shrimp.
To
gain consumer acceptance of imitation shell-fish, the texture, flavour
and appearance of fresh shell-fish must be matched as closely as
possible. This has successfully been achieved by Japanese processors who
produce surimi as an economic alternative to fresh fillets and
imitation shell-fish which are barely distinguishable from the real
thing.
A customer walks into a pharmacy looking for a new cream to keep their hands soft. They don’t have much to go by other than packaging and price, so they choose the same brand they use on their face.
They
get outside and squeeze some out of the tube with their normal
pressure, and their palm fills up with too much thin, watery cream that
seems to do nothing to remove the dryness. A disappointed customer, and
the very reason the cosmetics company should have used physical analysis
on their cream before they released it for sale.
Potatoes are a common, even basic, vegetable in Western diets, in some cases assuming the status of a staple.
Potato
snack foods include French Fries and dried miniature versions of them
(chips in the US sense, or crisps in UK) in many flavours. They appear
as mashed potato in many convenience meals such as TV dinners, and as
potato salads in take-away meals.
The best discoveries are total accidents, and bubble tea is no exception.
The drink as we know it today found its origins in Taiwan in 1988 when Lin Hsiu Hui, a product developer in a tea house, decided on a whim to pour her tapioca pudding into her iced tea.
Perhaps excited by the extra level of texture she had incorporated into her drink, she passed it around the meeting room and it was met with acclaim; the product was tweaked and brought onto the market, and its sales rocketed.
Self-adhesive
nail wraps can be tricky to fit to the nail. To avoid ripples in the
surface, the film must be flexible enough to be smoothed into small
corners but also taut across the surface of the nail.
The
wrap must also be tough enough to avoid tearing during application and
have a reasonable strength. All these properties can be assessed using a
tensile test.
Nail wraps are flexible adhesive films that are smoothed onto the nail’s surface and trimmed.
They
provide an opportunity for intricate designs that can be printed by the
manufacturer that would otherwise be difficult to paint by hand.
The design will be consistent across all nails and removes the difficulty of using the non-dominant hand to paint.
A
manicure is subject to a lot of abuse as the wearer goes about their
daily life (opening jars, cooking, typing on a keyboard).
For
repeat purchase of a nail polish, it must be able to stand up to this
type of use. As well as the adhesion properties mentioned above, the
stiffness and toughness of a polish are all extremely important.
An
overly stiff, brittle polish would be undesirable as it would break
when a nail is bent when opening a soda can, for example. The low
stiffness is important for the polish to follow the nail as it bends. A
high strain to failure is also crucial, or the polish film would break
under the slightest deformation.
Nail polish has been developed to have a faster drying time with brands claiming “dry in 60 seconds” or “quickdry”.
However,
smudging a manicure is still a common complaint. There are also
difficulties accelerating the drying time of more natural polishes
containing fewer volatile solvents. New products must be tested for this
in a consistent way.
