Taking a new product from the lab to the plant floor and out the door to the consumer is a daunting process for most product developers. Some companies are so fearful of changes in product quality during scale-up that they insist on conducting consumer tests only on products made on manufacturing systems at production scale.
This drives consumer testing to the back end of the product development sequence and forces sometimes inaccurate assumptions to be made about consumer needs. Mishandling scale-up can not only raise product development costs, it can delay launch and ultimately deliver a product that falls short of consumer expectations.