Quality should make a product what it is; conforming to requirements or specification. In this context, quality may be defined in different ways depending on the interest of the manufacturers, or how they want to impress it upon their customers.
One difficulty in using this approach is that the definition of quality is neither precise nor consensual. Quality, much like terms such as effectiveness, satisfaction and leadership, are descriptors rather than concepts and no objective reference exists.
Quality is often used as a qualifier in describing some product or service, for example, high quality product, high quality education, high quality art, high quality health care, and so on.
Therefore, in relation to industrial food processing, quality can have several connotations:
- Product based – related to features or attributes of the product that enhance quality, food example, organically produced food products as opposed to ‘regular’ products.
- User based – the user determines the quality of the product. Researchers define this user based criteria as ‘fitness for use’, for example, ready-to-eat microwavable dinners as opposed to other forms of manufactured dinners.
- Manufacturer based – conformance to specifications. Manufacturing engineering specifies the product characteristics and the more closely manufacturing can conform to those requirements, the better to quality of the product.
- Value based – the notion of price and value for money is introduced into this definition of quality. Quality is the degree to excellence at an acceptable price and the control of variability at an acceptable cost. Value comprises price and quality of product and service.
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