More like “Misfunctional Food”
When’s the last time you tried a food or beverage, functional or otherwise, that made you say, Wow!—and really stop to savor the flavor?
Many manufacturers of functional foods, for example, are just adding functional ingredients to standard recipes.
The result is a market overrun with foods with healthful characteristics but also rampant off flavors, best enjoyed by plugging your nose as you chew quickly and swallow. And then there’s that bitter aftertaste…
But what if we told you it doesn’t have to be that way?
Food science saves the day
Patric Development is more than just a well-equipped R&D lab where we tinker with the science of taste. It’s a state of mind. It’s the pursuit of pure food & beverage perfection.
We’re here to help you solve any problem with a food-science answer.
What we do
We have at our fingertips a vast array of knowledge and tools based on meticulous lab research by Dr. Alan and peers. That means we can draw upon more ways to approach and solve your problem.
Patric Food & Beverage Development is for food & beverage manufacturers and businesses at any stage of product development.
Whether starting from scratch or troubleshooting an existing process—the power of food science can transmute your wildest dreams into real products that enchant customers and keep them coming back.
Formulation and Product Development
We take a concept and run it through the paces, researching the market and similar existing products (even sampling while we brainstorm).
Accounting for constraints like ingredients, calories, dosage, labeling, and other important factors, we make prototypes—which we test using sensory evaluation and market screening.
Then we optimize the recipe and lay out a manufacturing strategy.
Scaling to Meet Demand
Scaling chocolate, confections, bakery, and beverages is not as straightforward as multiplying the recipe.
Many gelling agents, for example, don’t scale linearly. And neither does most any water-based mixture. And then how do you make sure it’s consistent from batch to batch?
Reach out to us and we’ll walk through the steps involved.
Bitterness Masking in Functional Foods & Beverages
The molecular structure of many naturally plant-produced secondary metabolites–think caffeine, flavonoids, and cannabinoids, activates our bitter receptors. You can’t help that.
But at Patric Development we’re equipped with a number of different ways of counteracting bitterness perception by masking, encapsulating, and/or balancing bitter compounds as a comprehensive part of our formulation process.
Which means no more unpleasant lingering aftertaste. No more overloading with non-nutritive sweeteners to compensate.
In short: natural, delicious, and effective solutions to the bitterness problem.
Technical Problem-Solving
From shelf-life considerations to sensory evaluation, we can help you discover what exactly is causing your problems and outline a solution.
It could be as simple as marketing in the freezer aisle instead of the fridge. Or adjusting your water content.
Or it could involve something more complex that would be determined by in-depth organoleptic assessment .
“When Alan puts his mind to something, he will accomplish it. He’s methodical and thorough in his approach to solving problems; every nuance that may affect the outcome will be considered, yielding a near-perfect solution. ”
Ingolf Gruen
Food Chemist, Mizzou
Scientist & Professor“I came to Dr. Alan to find out how he gets such spectacular flavor into his bars. Over my 7-hour session, he walked me through each step, including which measurements to take during roasting and tempering to keep flavor and quality consistent. Applying what he showed me will allow my team to repeat our successes and learn from our failures.”
Gregory Owen
Institute for Chocolate Studies, Princeton University
President Emeritus“I’m sure that any success as craft chocolate makers we might have…will be in large part the direct result of two days very well spent [consulting with Elevated].”
David Senk
Arete Chocolate
Founder & Chocolate MakerHow it works
Your project is unique. So is your problem. We tailor our consulting process to fit your specific needs. We’ll talk about factors like your regulations and budget, market position and goals, what you’ve tried before, and anything else that might play into what’s keeping you from maximum quality and success.
- Discovery and desired outcome
- Strategy and setup
- Conceptualization, experimentation, screening, etc
- Evaluation and optimization
- Next steps
It all starts with a conversation about your project. Whether or not we go forward, we guarantee you’ll at least walk away with some helpful new tidbits of knowledge.
