How The Cookie Crumbles

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Essential Question

Can we bake a healthier sugar cookie that tastes like the original recipe?

Engagement Scenario

With obesity rates in the United States among the highest in the world, increasing from 13% in 1962 to 35.7% in 2010^[1], the head of baking at the ______ Foods Company has decided to offer a new version of the company’s best-selling sugar cookie using a healthier recipe. To accomplish this, the company has decided to hold a competition among teams of its bakers to determine which new recipe will be accepted and marketed.

Your team is to develop a new recipe while trying to maintain the desirable qualities of the current popular cookie. You are also responsible for designing a new package for the cookies – one that will help maintain the current sales level of the cookie. Develop a package on which all claims meet FDA standards. You will also design a food label that meets FDA standards.

A very important component of the competition is a sensory evaluation to determine if your new cookie tastes good enough to market. Your team will design and conduct a sensory evaluation as well.

To accomplish your task, you and your team will research the roles different ingredients play in cookie recipes and what can be done to make a cookie healthier. In addition, you will research the regulations regarding food labels and attributes of quality, marketing-friendly packaging. In order to judge the palatability of the new cookie, you will need to research how to design a sensory evaluation and quantify and analyze the results. You will keep your research notes, plans, and sensory test results in a research notebook.

After researching on-line resources and other informational texts on healthier recipes and sensory evaluation, and after participating in enabling activities in class, write a report to the officials of your company that compares the new cookies to the original cookies and argues for the inclusion of the new, healthier cookie in the company’s product line. Be sure to support your position with evidence from the texts and results from the sensory evaluation. You will research via the internet and will organize and treat data using an MS Excel spreadsheet with appropriate mathematical procedures. You will investigate how to experimentally determine caloric content of foods and calculate experimental error.

A presentation, based upon your report, will be presented to bakers and marketing officials in a format of your design. You will need to include data from the sensory evaluation and other supporting evidence from your research.

Your development team has to compete with other teams to create a healthy cookie for ________ Foods. The team with the best cookie will see their recipe through development and onto supermarket shelves. The food company executives want to see recipes, sensory evaluation results, packaging that meets FDA standards for nutritional claims on labels, and a clean label of ingredients that can be released to the public. You will deliver all of this in a 5-minute group presentation in a few weeks.

Course 1 Unit 3 Complete Curriculum

[1]http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=USRTXT3DK#a=1 - Reuters.com

Appendices

Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5
Appendix 1 Appendix 2	Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 13 Appendix 14 Appendix 15 Appendix 16	None	Appendix 5	None
Day 6	Day 7	Day 8	Day 9	Day 10
Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 6	Appendix 7	Appendix 8	Appendix 8	None
Day 11	Day 12	Day 13	Day 14	Day 15
Appendix 1 Appendix 2	None	Appendix 9 Appendix 10 Appendix 11	None	None
Day 16	Day 17	Day 18	Day 19	Day 20
Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 12	None	None	None	Appendix 13 Appendix 14 Appendix 15 Appendix 16