The soft side of QFD: a comparative study on customer requirements’ prioritization in the food sector

Despite its large popularity, the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method has been the object of numerous studies addressing the problem of the assessment and prioritization of customer requirements. Nevertheless, a comparative analysis of these approaches to investigate their practical usability is scarcely discussed. This paper aims at filling this gap by means of a practical case study at a manufacturer in the food sector, where five of the most common approaches used to augment the House of Quality (HoQ) were analyzed and the results were compared. To achieve such a goal, semi-structured questionnaires were developed to capture consumers’ preferences and expectations. The outputs of this study contribute to a better understanding of the potential and limitations of the examined approaches in order to address practitioners and companies in decision-making processes and resources allocation. Moreover, the article can serve as a reference for further investigations in the development of food products, where both intrinsic and extrinsic qualities need to be addressed.