This is a Notice of Intent to Award. The Midwest Area, Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture intends to issue an award to Texture Technologies Corp., 6 Patton Drive, South Hamilton, MA 01982. This is a sole source procurement under the authority of FAR 6.302-1. Only one responsible source and no other brand equipment will satisfy agency requirements. This is a requirement of the USDA-ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit, MWA, Madison, WI for the vendor to provide TA.XT Texture Analyzer. This instrument allows the scientist to collect invaluable data on cranberries throughout the year. The data allows measurable physical traits important to the cranberry industry and incorporate the results into the breeding program. Minimum requirements include: 1) 5kg capacity and Texture Exponent software, 2) Converter plug from M6 to M3 thread, 3) 2kg calibration weight, 4) Heavy duty platform with one aluminium or Lexan plate, 5) 3" diameter cylinder (plate) aluminium 10mm tall, 6) Stainless steel 2mm diameter punch probe, 25mm long. Interested parties should submit written mail responses including prices and technical data sufficient to determine capability to meet the entire requirement and must be received in this office within 6 calendar days after publication of this notice. Written responses should be sent to Dolores Milton, Contracting Officer at US Dairy Forage Research Center, Administration Office, 1925 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1108. It should be noted that no contract will be awarded on the basis of offers received in response to this notice, but will be used to determine if a comparable source more advantageous to the Government is available. If no affirmative written responses are received, negotiations will be held with Texture Technologies Corp. without further notice. This acquisition is being conducted under the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, Simplified Acquisition Procedures. SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION: Upon the basis of the following justification, I, as Contracting Officer, hereby approve the use of other than full and open competition for the proposed contractual action pursuant to the authority of 10 U.S.C.2304(c)(1), FAR Subpart 6.302-1(a)(2)(iii), Only one responsible source and no other brand of equipment will satisfy agency requirements. JUSTIFICATION The TA.XT Plus comes highly recommended from a colleague in the food science department at the University of Wisconsin. They use this machine because it is the industry standard and is very powerful and versatile. We were able to use this same model to do some preliminary testing on cranberry, in the short time the machine was available. However, we will no longer be able to get the time on the machine that is necessary to continue and expand our research. After collecting 3 years of data, we are confident it accurately serves our purposes and will need to perform more extensive research. To avoid losing years of data, hours of labor, and maintain continuity of research data, this machine and software are necessary to integrate our past data with current and future data. This software uses formulas to produce our data that we cannot duplicate with any other software. There are other machines that perform similar techniques, but they are not able to produce the vast amounts of data points we are interested in. This machine has attachments that can measure a huge range of characteristics that are, and will be, vital to the cranberry industry. Some of these traits we will measure with this machine are biting/cutting force, firmness, elasticity, and compaction. Another unique feature of this machine is the option to test at different temperature ranges, which is important for cranberries since a majority of products are made using frozen fruit. We can also measure stickiness of sweetened dried cranberries and there are even tension attachments that we could use to measure the vigor of plants. There are just so many possibilities with this machine and that is what makes it the top of the line texture analyzer in the food science world. Since cranberry is a food, we can take advantage of the full spectrum of its capabilities both now and in the future. Finally, we have also tried another machine that measures the same few traits that we started testing for. That machine, the FirmTech 2 did not give us accurate or reliable data compared with the TA.XT Plus. While using this machine, we performed several tests to see if the readings we got were accurate or not. We tested laying the fruit different ways on the machine and got very different readings depending on which way the fruit was laying. We also measured the same fruit multiple times and even that produced varying readings - on the same fruit! The data points you get from this machine and software are also very limited. You simply cannot get all of the valuable data that we already have collected for 3 years. Also, when using statistics to analyze the data from both machines, our grad students found some significance in measurements of traits from the TA.XT Plus, but found the measurements of trait data to not be statistically significant.
