beverage

10 Reasons You Need a Food Science Lab for R&D

December 5, 2023 by Alan McClure

As a shrewd and effective entrepreneur in the food industry, you probably face important choices every day. Concerns about budget, quality, safety, production, market demands…

And of course most importantly—enchanting your customers with deliciousness.

You may be wondering whether you really need a fullbore food science lab for your product development and R&D needs. Whether it’s worth the cost (or we prefer “investment” but we’ll get to that).

So what makes food science consultants stand out?

Well in addition to the incalculable experience, training, and molecular creativity earned through years of practice with the best equipment and the top culinary masters of our age…there are also some easily tangible tools & techniques for culinary R&D that only food scientists like us can offer.

Seriously, come visit the lab! We have lots of cool stuff to show you (and let you taste)…

In the meantime, here are just 10 of the many things you definitely won’t get with your run-of-the-mill food development consultant.

1. Spinzall – The magic merry-go-round of food science

This compact centrifuge is a maestro of the trade, breaking down mixtures into component parts; spinning a liquid at high speed to segregate its materials by density.

For example, a liquid such as lemon juice can separate into fruit solids, clarified juice, and citrus oils (also known as pellet, supernate, and oil layers, respectively).

By separating ingredients into their core components, the Spinzall centrifuge opens doors to understanding and manipulating food on a molecular level. It’s a stepping stone for crafting novel textures and flavors that tickle the taste buds in new, exhilarating ways:

Clarify juices for full flavor but a crystal-clear appearance
Extract essential oils from herbs
Remove suspended solids that can separate and/or spoil over time

The Spinzall is crucial for innovating textures, flavors, and new culinary creations—but it can also play a role in quality control and ensuring consistency across batches.

By separating undesired particles and elements that affect flavor or shelf-life, it makes sure there’s nothing in your final product except pure goodness.

So the next time you marvel at the crystal clarity of a beverage or the unique texture of a modernist cuisine dish—remember, there may be a Spinzall and a team of curious food scientists behind the scenes, spinning their magic to elevate your culinary experience beyond the expected.

2. Analytical Balance – The art of precision

This ain’t your science teacher’s balance scale. It’s not even your college pot-dealer’s fancy digital scale.

The analytical balance we use in our food-science R&D lab measures mass down to the 10,000th of a gram. Put it this way: your typical high-quality digital scale can measure differences down to 0.01 grams. Our analytical balance measures down to 0.0001 grams

It’s so precise, it has to sit on a marble table, lest the room’s vibrations and air currents disrupt the measurement.

Dose small quantities of powerful ingredients with extreme accuracy.
Hit that accuracy with extreme precision, which means that measurement after measurement gives you the same result.
Protect the measurement from error introduced by building vibration and/or airflow

This level of precision may not seem important when it comes to playing around with individual recipes—but when you scale up for production, you multiply every factor by some order of magnitude. Which can make any small deviations in measurement quite impactful.

3. Psychrometer – Take the pulse of humidity

Turning from the material to the atmospheric side of food—the humble yet important psychrometer measures moisture in the air, which plays a pivotal role in the food we enjoy.

A Psychrometer comprises two thermometers; one dry and one wet. By comparing the temperature differential, it calculates the ambient humidity, which factors into food science on many levels.

Moisture influences how ingredients meld, the texture of food, and even its shelf life—so understanding how products behave at various humidity levels is crucial for developing tasty treats people can enjoy anywhere.

In a food science R&D lab, a psychrometer helps maintain carefully controlled environments to study and adjust for these important factors, ensuring that each bite delivers the experience your customers are hoping for.

Perfect the crunch of a chip
Ensure the right softness in bread
Extend the shelf life of packaged products

Managing humidity is key also for quality control. Think about what might happen if the humidity in your production facility was different from where you developed your recipe—that means the moisture content of your finished product doesn’t match your R&D, and you have no real control over what shows up in front of your customer.

We shudder to imagine…

4. Food Dehydrator – Leather it up

Ever marveled at the lasting texture of dried fruits or the savory intensity of jerky? A food dehydrator uses air circulation and sometimes low heat to evaporate moisture from foods, leaving behind morsels with condensed flavors, unique textures, and much longer shelf life.

Create healthy snacks that won’t go bad
Preserve seasonal produce for year-round enjoyment
Make high-quality dried herbs

By reducing moisture, a food dehydrator creates an unfriendly environment for bacteria and molds, which helps make perishable items last much longer.

The next time you enjoy a delicious dried apple slice or a toothsome piece of jerky—remember there’s a food dehydrator and maybe a food scientist or two monitoring the drying process carefully, measuring things like moisture content, water activity, and microbial activity, to bring forth the best product possible.

5. Chemical Dryer – A magic wand of waterlessness

A chemical dryer like ours uses gentle vacuum conditions to remove moisture from a substance with minimal heat, which reduces any unwanted chemical changes.

Its primary use is to convert various chemical hydrates (having water) to anhydrous compounds (without water), which can then be used for their functional properties. For example, epsom salt is a hydrate in its standard form. But in its anhydrous form it can be used to pull moisture out of other solvents to help purify them, when even small amounts of moisture can be a problem.

Dehydrate delicate substances that can’t tolerate heat or convection air currents
Remove all moisture when even minute amounts can be a problem
Complete the process of any ethanol-based solvent.

It’s much more gentle than a drying oven or even a dehydrator. Though our chemical dryer has the option to use low heat as well, for certain circumstances.

6. Water Purification – Tapping into elemental magic

When formulating beverages, we like to start from scratch with pure H20—to make sure every potential flavor factor is under our control from the start.

In our R&D lab, municipal water flows through several steps to remove any existing minerals, chemicals, or other impurities:

Water softener
Activated charcoal filter
Reverse osmosis system
Deionizer

Then we can add carbonation if that’s the kind of beverage we’re formulating, followed by any minerals or other flavor additives we want in the finished product, in very specific and controlled amounts.

But the important thing is that throughout the beverage development process, we control every aspect of the ingredient that represents the vast majority of the recipe: Water!

Read more about our food lab’s water purification setup at our sister site.

7. Sonicator – The sound bath & the fury

A Sonicator uses ultrasonic waves to stir up a storm on a microscopic level, breaking down cells, mixing ingredients more thoroughly than a blender, or dispersing flavor particles evenly through liquids.

The Sonicator transforms electrical energy into useful mechanical energy by pushing soundwaves through an aqueous medium at various frequencies depending on what you need. The effect is powerful enough that it can form cavitation bubbles in pure water!

Create stable emulsions
Extract compounds from plants or other tissue
Dissolve chemical compounds incredibly efficiently

This machine uniquely lets us blend and mix at high frequency without the spinning effect caused by other methods. And unlike blenders, doesn’t incorporate any oxygen into the mix—in fact, it forces dissolved gasses out! This means that when oxidation is a potential issue, sonication is the go-to option.

8. The Vortex Mixer – Whirling wonder of agitation

The Vortex Mixer is a simple padded arm that holds a container of liquid. The pad oscillates at specific frequencies to swirl the liquid at precise high speeds (in the thousands of RPM).

Think of a wine aficionado swirling a glass by the stem to “breathe” or incorporate air into the wine for deeper enjoyment of its phenols and flavors.

Our Vortex Mixer does that, but at a speed that would make any sommelier weep. All in the name of uniform mixing, without the blade of a blender.

Dissolve compounds more quickly
Break up centrifuge pellets
Mix highly viscous substances in a controlled space such as a centrifuge tube or test tube.

Compared to the Sonicator and other methods, it mixes incredibly quickly—just seconds sometimes. The Vortex Mixer also has an option to add vibration along with the swirling oscillation, which further helps randomize the mixing motion.

9. Induction Burner – Harnessing invisible power

Induction burner in our food science lab

Ahh the induction burner—a modern marvel that brings the power of magnetic fields to the stage of culinary science.

Induction burners electromagnetically excite the electrons in steel pots and pans to warm their contents without flames or direct heat.

The whole container heats evenly, reducing hot spots and burn points, and cooking what’s inside more quickly and consistently than other burners.

Cook sauces without breaking.
Boil much faster than than other methods.
Reduce delicate fruit purees without burning or sticking.

Induction burners offer precise control over temperature, as well as much better energy efficiency than traditional cooktops. They also help make the lab safer—because once you remove the metal implement, the induction surface is no longer active, and cools quickly to the touch.

10. Thermomix: The culinary composer

The Thermomix is a marvel that can blend, chop, mince, stir, cook, steam, weigh, and more—all while maintaining total control over temperature and time. It conducts a symphony of precision and versatility, choreographing the ingredients to fulfill their exact and utmost potential in a recipe.

Knead dough & mix batter
Perfect confectionery recipes
Create beverages with unique properties

Simply program it with the process you want, weigh in the right ingredients, and the machine handles the rest with precision and accuracy…so the attending scientist/chef/creator can focus on other more important work than watching the pot.

The Food Science Wizard – Pulling the strings of theory

Okay yes, there’s an eleventh reason that unifies them all together. Welcome to the most intangible dimension of why food science R&D delivers results that other consumable consultants simply can’t measure up to. The least quantifiable, most important factor of the entire food science R&D process.

The scientist him/herself.

You can’t really measure the impact of creativity or lived experience. You can’t quantify inspiration, nor the random connections that spring up in the active mind of a deeply trained and educated expert.

We didn’t get into this field because we love equipment. We got into it because we love food, and want to know every little detail of how it works and how to make it better—down to a molecular level.

We develop our science and collect these and other incredibly valuable food-lab tools…but the real power driving what we do for people who want to sell consistent deliciousness to their customers, is our creativity. Both in problem-solving and product development.

Let us know what you’re working on, and we’ll be glad to teach you more about what we do!

Nutraceutical R&D: Beverage Formulation Station

October 30, 2023 by Alan McClure

If you visit the Patric Development food science lab, there’s a lot to take in. We have innumerable gadgets and special machines for developing the best recipes possible; for any kind of edible you can imagine.

But first: How about a nice cold glass of sparkling water on tap?

And this is sparkling water like you’ve never tasted it…highly carbonated, crystal clear, and very refreshing on the palate.

Well that’s just one of the unique features that makes our food science lab stand out from most food and beverage consultants.

We’re here to serve.

But did we install a multi-thousand dollar system just to make the best, cleanest, perfect pH club soda for visitors?

No, of course not. It also serves a much deeper purpose…

Why do we have a state-of-the-art water purification system?

The main reason we set up this complex water station is to help with our initial prototyping stages of beverage formulation.

This is where we test flavor combinations, mouthfeel, bitterness, etc, when developing a nutraceutical, energy drink, or other beverage concept.

And we want to start with water that’s totally pure. Cleared of any naturally occurring (e.g., minerals) or added compounds (e.g., chloramine) besides H2O that might affect how it tastes and how it interacts with other ingredients.

So here’s what happens to our water before it flows out of the tap:

Water softener

First we pass the very hard municipal water through a water softener. This gets rid of calcium, iron, and other minerals that might impact pH, flavor, etc.

You may not think of minerals as impacting flavor—but consider the experience of drinking distilled water compared to a bottle of mineral water. Not only does it taste very different, but it feels different and quenches thirst differently too.

Trust the experts: we did a blind tasting of several market mineral waters, reverse-osmosis waters, and distilled water—and came to an important conclusion:

If you’re going to make a product that’s mostly water, then the mineral profile is a variable you definitely want full control over in the formulation and development process.

The activated charcoal water softener also removes any chlorine/chloramine, which can damage reverse osmosis membranes (where the water flows next).

Reverse osmosis (RO)

This process basically pushes water through a specialized membrane that filters out even more than the activated charcoal does (but it’s also more delicate). Running the two methods in sequence results in water approaching ~95% the purity of distilled water—but without all the hassle of distilling, collecting, and storing.

Deionizing cartridge

If we need even higher purity thresholds, we pass the RO water through a deionizing (DI) cartridge to remove the very last stragglers from the previous processes (e.g., silicas, nitrates, phosphates) attaining 99.9%+ pure water.

Now we have the equivalent of unlimited distilled water on-demand, cutting out plastic containers and deliveries and wasted energy and materials.

Then once we’ve put in all that hard work to create pure water, we can start adding things back in to build the foundations we want for our R&D projects.

Forced carbonation

In this step we add pressurized CO2, which dissolves in the water. This is called “forced” carbonation, as opposed to byproduct carbonation (like in fermentation).

It’s set to extra high carbonation; both because we like the taste and mouthfeel of it that way—but also because it will result in a prototype that’s actually characteristic of your final product, compared to starting with regular carbonated water which would turn out something kind of flat and lifeless.

This part of our beverage station is optional, and there are plenty of instances where we wouldn’t add carbonation.

For example, a vegetable supplement breakfast drink probably wouldn’t taste great carbonated…so in that case we’d bypass this step and move on to start playing with emulsions to make sure your ingredients don’t separate and settle.

So, like everything else we offer, it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Chilling plate

Before it hits the tap, our room-temperature water runs through a chilling plate to get it quickly and quite literally ice cold and ready to serve.

This way we can develop prototypes that match the conditions of consumption. Because even if your nutraceutical or energy drink is shelf-stable, chances are American consumers will still want to enjoy it cold. It’s just so much more refreshing that way. So that’s where we start.

This step means that we’re getting into the shoes of your consumer—from the earliest stages of beverage formulation. Which ultimately results in a tastier, more enjoyable product for your customers.

What our formulation beverage station means for you

Why should you care about any of this?

Well if we didn’t take all these steps, and just used regular filtered water for prototyping, there would be slight differences in the final recipe, depending on the water you used for production. This would undermine consistency, which is vital for successful production and scaling.

But more important than that, it’s because all this precision helps us formulate a recipe that guarantees your emulsions don’t break or other ugly outcomes—by testing and controlling things like pH, brix, turbidity (cloudiness), and viscosity/mouthfeel, as well as assuring that ingredient profiles allow for shelf-life expectations and labeling targets.

Not a lot of beverage R&D labs can offer that kind of comprehensive prototyping and precision beverage formulation. But if you want to develop a scalable nutraceutical, energy drink, or other beverage that’s ready for market and comparable to any of the top brands, it’s a critical investment that will save time and money later down the line.

Bitterness in Beverage Formulation

July 2, 2023 by Alan McClure

The beverage industry has witnessed a remarkable transformation in recent years, with an influx of small businesses dedicated to creating high-quality, smaller-batch products. This diversification has led to an explosion of unique flavors and ingredients, pushing the boundaries of traditional beverage offerings.

Once upon a time, a “soft drink” was basically water, sugar (often corn syrup), flavoring, color, and maybe caffeine.

Believe it or not, Coke and Sprite are essentially the same recipe—except for a touch of herbal flavor and that iconic caramel coloring (plus the caffeine of course).

Fortunately, creative beverage producers have broken free of the mold, reaching for new heights of uniqueness and ingredient use. But along with this delightful new turn in gourmet and high-quality beverages, comes a huge increase in the importance of understanding bitterness.

One of the 5 basic taste categories, bitterness can add complexity and depth to beverages, though it can also turn off consumers for various reasons. Sometimes bitterness is part of the charm. Lots of delicious common beverages are bitter: coffee, tea, beer, tonic water, wine, grapefruit juice, numerous classic cocktails…

But when bitterness isn’t desired, or when it’s poorly balanced, it can be quite unpleasant for the consumer—especially for those unfortunate (but not uncommon) folks called “super tasters” who have high bitter sensitivity due to genetic contribution. Not so “super” for drink manufacturers…but fortunately there are plenty of ways to handle bitterness, even for the extrasensitive.

So let’s talk about naturally occurring bitterness in beverages, and the different ingredients that contribute to this controversial taste sensation.

How do you measure bitterness in foods & beverages?

Beer drinkers are readily familiar with IBUs. It’s an easy way of helping customers narrow their choices based on how bitter they prefer their beer.

However the IBU is not a measurement of perceived bitterness; but rather the amount of iso-alpha acid (derived from hops) that’s dissolved in the solution, where 1 IBU = 1 ppm (or 1 mg/L).

So it only works with beer. And it’s really only a rough indicator, because you can sweeten a high-IBU beer to a point that it no longer tastes bitter, but still has a high concentration of iso-alpha acids.

Another, more generalized way of measuring bitterness is Bitterness value, which is based on the smallest concentration of 1 gram of a substance dissolved in water, that can still be tasted as bitter.

This scale centers around the perceived bitterness of quinine (an alkaloid extracted from chinchona bark) which still delivers a bitter taste all the way to 1 g dissolved in 2 liters2000 mL of water.

On that scale, quinine has a bitterness value of 200,000. Pure caffeine has a similar value, though somewhat less.

And by the way, the most bitter natural substance is gentian root, which boasts a bitterness value of 58 million. Which means 1g of gentian extract can bitter up to 58,000 liters of water! That’s enough to fill a 9 x 4 meter backyard pool!

While this scale provides a numerical value for bitterness, it is crucial to remember that taste perception is highly subjective, influenced by personal preference and biological factors such as individual tastebud distribution and age.

What ingredients add bitterness to foods & beverages?

For beverage products like nutraceuticals, energy drinks, and carbonated soft drinks—whether clean-label or otherwise—there are a lot of ways to get the flavors and effects you want to give to your customers.

But many of these natural ingredients are inherently bitter, and require some kind of bitterness management.

Stimulants

Natural stimulant ingredients like caffeine, theobromine (found in cacao and small amounts in tea & coffee), mateine (found in yerba mate), and guaranine (found in guarana) can impart bitterness to beverages.

While these compounds are known for their uplifting effects, their bitterness can vary depending on factors such as the roast level of coffee beans or the percentage of cacao in chocolate.

Fun fact: when training for expert sensory analysis of bitterness, the reference material used is a solution of pure caffeine.

Alcohol

Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is a naturally bitter compound. The method of producing, refining, and aging the ultimate product contributes to the character and level of bitterness—because of compounds such as tannins, phenols, and hop-derived extracts. Which are responsible for the underlying bitterness balanced to perfection (one hopes) in wines, spirits, and beers.

Herbal & botanical bitterness

Many of the most common herbs & botanicals used for creating clean-label flavors add an element of bitterness. And some may surprise you, because their bitterness is usually balanced by other elements (cinnamon, for example, adds bitterness but we usually associate it with desserts).

Classic bitter beverage ingredients:

Chamomile
Dandelion
Citrus peels
Rhubarb
Grapefruit
Cranberry
Quinine
Wormwood
Gentian root

These natural compounds can add complexity and desirable astringency to a beverage formulation, but they can also be overdone to disastrous effect. (Ever leave cinnamon sticks too long in your hot cider? Yech!)

Cannabinoids

With the increasing popularity of cannabis-infused beverages, it’s important to understand how cannabinoids like THC and CBD, can introduce bitterness to a recipe. You can’t just add cannabis extract to your recipe and send it out. There’s work to do first…

Ways to balance & mask bitterness in beverage products

Creating a well-balanced and enjoyable beverage that’s more than just sugar, water, and artificial flavors, generally requires some degree of bitterness management.

There are three main ways to approach this:

Flavor (aroma) synergy:

Combining bitter ingredients with complementary aromas (often mis-termed as “flavors”), can help balance the overall gustatory profile. Aromas can add pleasant associations and context to bitterness.

For example, herbal bitterness can be mellowed by incorporating fruity or floral notes (a la strawberry/rhubarb). Grapefruit aroma is also particularly adept at making bitter beverage elements seem fitting and balanced. This synergy can create a more harmonious and pleasant flavor experience overall.

Taste synergy:

The term “taste” technically refers to the 5 types of flavor receptors we have: bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami. This method of balancing bitterness factors in foundational ingredients that bring taste but not aroma; like sugar, citric acid, water, and salt.

By carefully selecting and blending ingredients, beverage creators can manipulate the balance of bitterness. Different ratios and combinations of bitter and counterpart tastes (such as sugar) can lead to a well-balanced flavor profile, ensuring that bitterness does not overpower the drink. Skillful blending can result in a nuanced taste that appeals to a wide range of palates.

Bitterness suppression

Some ingredients have the ability to mask, diminish, or suppress the bitter taste of others. This includes simple, time-honored tricks—as well as high-level food-science techniques.

As you surely know, beverage producers all too often take the easy route—using large amounts of high-intensity sweeteners like stevia or monkfruit extract; which can help blot out bitterness while still maintaining a desirable level of sweetness. However, many consumers are quite sensitive to such non-nutritive sweeteners, which often carry off-flavors of their own (expecially at higher concentrations) sometimes even adding MORE bitterness to the aftertaste. So use with caution, and test via consumer analysis.

Getting more advanced; microencapsulation is a food chemistry technology that encloses bitter compounds within a hollow sugar molecule that prevents them from interacting with taste receptors on their way to the stomach, where the encapsulation readily breaks down.

This technique is especially useful for cannabis edibles, where you want those active ingredients to digest into the bloodstream, but not impart their highly bitter characteristics.

Don’t leave bitterness up to chance

Bitterness, though subjective, plays a crucial role in creating complex and intriguing flavor profiles in beverages and other foods. Understanding the ingredients that contribute to bitterness and using effective techniques to balance or mask it, is key to developing exceptional beverage products that keep your customers coming back for more.

However, crafting a quality beverage recipe formulation that effectively addresses bitterness requires expertise and an understanding of the science behind taste perception.

In this era of small businesses creating high-quality, smaller-batch products, the expertise of a food scientist can elevate your beverage offerings and help you stand out in a ridiculously crowded market.

An experienced food science consultant (not necessarily me—but I do have 20 years of award-winning formulation experience working with highly bitter ingredients) can help you develop innovative and market-ready beverages that fix bitterness naturally, while meeting consumer demands.

Want to develop a beverage that captivates the taste buds while addressing bitterness effectively? Reach out and let’s talk about how we can create a truly exceptional beverage formulation.

Good, Better, Best?

August 7, 2021 by Alan McClure

Sage advice from the product developer:

How good is good enough? Is it just fine to be as good as the competition, or does a product always need to be even better to compete? And what if better isn’t even good enough? Developing award-winning products that utterly destroy the competition means aiming for the best possible version of a product. With all of the choice in the marketplace these days, it’s the only reasonable approach to ensure sales superiority and passion for the product on the part of consumers, tastemakers, and influencers. But how does one achieve the very best?

The little-known hard truth is that creativity, inspiration, passion and dedication simply aren’t enough. Every single product has an infinite number of possible iterations. Tweaking one ingredient at a time based on experience may give you a better product than the one before, but is it actually the very best? Without following well constructed optimally designed product development experiments, the answer is almost certainly “No.” Luckily for us, such experiments make the product development process more precise and more efficient, saving time and money while producing not just a better product, but the very best!

-Alan McClure

Microbes May Make Mouths Merry

August 1, 2021 by Alan McClure

Sometime back I came across an article at Science Daily that got me thinking about the impact of our little microbial friends on the flavor of our favorite foods and beverages. The authors of the study noted that certain normally tasteless compounds, when exposed to microbes that are naturally present in the mouth and/or throat, are transformed into aromatic flavor compounds, in some cases even giving off the characteristic odor of a particular food in the aftertaste.

Thinking about the variety of foods and beverages that I’ve tasted over my life, some with magnificent, long-lasting finishes, and others that seem to spiral so quickly to an unsatisfying demise, it makes me wonder to what extent the microbes in my mouth had any say in the matter. There are countless implications to all of this, including whether it is possible to optimize conversion by the microbes by altering the flavorless reactant concentration, but also potentially by altering environmental conditions in the mouth (e.g., pH, calcium or sodium ion concentration, amount of saliva, etc.).

That’s lots of food for thought, so to speak, and speaking of thought, who knows, maybe they’ll find out that there are microbes that change the way we think as well.

-Alan McClure