formulation

Nutraceutical Food Scientist vs ChatGPT Gummies – Part 1

April 4, 2023 by Alan McClure

You may have already considered turning to ChatGPT to find new functional food recipes.

If you’ve played around with it and you have any experience with making functional food products such as gummies, you may have noticed some chinks in the armor.

The first and last thing to remember about this program is that it is not sentient. It uses machine learning to sort through everything it can access on the internet–2021 and earlier– and pull an answer that its training says best fits your question.

First I asked ChatGPT 3.5 how to make the best vegan gummy.

It’s a simple, basic question that anyone searching for a gummy recipe might ask, whether it will stand alone, serve a functional role, or even be a medicinal cannabis edible.

I wanted a recipe that doesn’t use any animal-derived ingredient (i.e., no gelatin). I was expecting that ChatGPTwould probably suggest something fruit-flavored because that’s so common in the gummy world.

As far as plant-derived gelling agents go, I know from experience that the three most common are pectin, agar, and starch. For homemade gummies, starch is rarely the choice, as the specialized-for-confectionery modified starches are hard to acquire, and standard starches, like corn starch, doesn’t serve the role as well.

I also thought that if ChatGPT really understood “best” it would offer something with pectin, given the well-known excellent organoleptic characteristics that result from its use.

But this is what it came up with:

Here’s a recipe for making vegan gummies:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup of fruit juice (preferably low pH like lemon juice or orange juice)
1/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon of agar agar powder (a vegan alternative to gelatin)
1/2 teaspoon of citric acid
1/4 teaspoon of salt
Optional: functional ingredient
Equipment:
Silicone gummy molds
Saucepan
Whisk
Dropper or syringe
Instructions:
In a saucepan, mix together the fruit juice, water, agar agar powder, citric acid, and salt.
Whisk the mixture together over low heat until the agar agar powder dissolves completely.
Add the optional functional ingredient.
Remove the saucepan from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Using a dropper or syringe, fill the silicone gummy molds with the mixture.
Place the molds in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes to let the gummies set.
Once the gummies have set, remove them from the molds and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
That’s it! This recipe should yield about 20-30 gummies, depending on the size of your molds. Make sure to label your gummies and keep them out of reach of children or pets
ChatGPT 3.5

Don’t use this ChatGPT gummy recipe!

TLDR: It will turn out sour and may not even gel.

Let me break down what went wrong, and then I’ll ask it a more specific question.

Precision measuring

Generally speaking, it’s better to measure by mass/weight than by volume. Ingredients tend to vary in density from producer to producer. For example ¼ tsp. salt will have a different mass of salt depending on the grain/flake shape and size. Which can change the flavor drastically, especially when you scale up for market (which you can’t realistically do volumetrically with dry ingredients).

It’s not surprising that ChatGPT pulled a gummy recipe with volume-based measurement. It’s just drawing from what’s available on the internet—which leans toward American preferences, and American households still don’t often have scales in their kitchens. But if you’re making gummies commercially, definitely measure your recipe by weight.

Flavor

It makes sense to see fruit as the basis of this recipe. Fruit juices and purees are common gummy ingredients.

But I am surprised to see it suggest a low pH (high acid) juice like lemon, especially since citric acid (which makes lemon sour) is also included.

People generally prefer their fruit-flavored gummies to be sweet—and there is essentially no sugar in this recipe, especially if you go with lemon juice. But even orange, pineapple, or some other juice would skew toward the sour side…and without adding additional sugar to balance it, I suspect these gummies would taste quite harsh.

Okay but let’s say you’re averse to sugar, or you just like things super sour—there’s still the fact that many functional ingredients are inherently bitter.

As any chef or food scientist knows, bitterness is enhanced by acid and mitigated by sweetness. So a recipe this sour would potentially be unpalatably bitter, without adding ingredients to manage bitterness.

And if we’re talking about flavor, we can’t just talk about sour, bitter, and sweet.

We also have to consider one of the biggest flavor factors in any recipe: aroma! It can’t just be an afterthought.

You have to consider all the ingredients that add aroma to the recipe, and in the case of the ChatGPT one above, there isn’t much. Various extracts from fruit or spices are commonly used to add flavor to cooked confectionery such as gummies. Without them, you can end up with a very boring product. Cooking down lemon or orange juice, for example, results in a kind of “canned” washed-out flavor, and it’s not a good look. But imagine the essence of the zest of a lemon or orange rind, or excellent bourbon vanilla extract. Such ingredients can be used to great effect.

Using agar for gummies

Why did ChatGPT choose agar as a baseline for the gummies? It’s impossible to know for sure, but my guess is that more people use agar because it’s easier to work with and doesn’t require a specific pH range and sugar concentration in order to gel.

Pectin is, for lack of a better word, more difficult.

And if you Google “vegan agar gummy” versus “vegan pectin gummy” you’ll notice there are almost 25% more instances of agar.

Of course more doesn’t mean better. But ChatGPT has no way of knowing that. It has no mouth, taste buds, or experience-based understanding of flavor or mouthfeel.

Also, agar is known for having lots of variability in its gelling capacity, which is apparently based upon regional differences in chemical composition. This means sometimes even batch to batch variation of agar from the same manufacturer might cause noticeable texture differences.

Another major consideration is that agar needs to be heated to dissolve in water—but when acid is also involved, the agar begins to break down; which dramatically reduces its gelling capacity.

In other words step one—which calls for mixing the lemon juice, citric acid, and agar before heating—is not advised.

To do it right you would first cook agar in a sugar solution to a particular temperature or brix, and then cool it down to below 200° F before blending with acidic ingredients.

Because of agar’s flexibility, ChatGPT’s gummy recipe might work—but it would then be using significantly more agar than necessary, and therefore your cost of goods increases for no reason other than following ChatGPT’s wasteful practices.

Home gummy makers may not care, but business owners generally want to avoid wasting one of their more expensive gummy ingredients—when a slight change in process could solve the problem instead.

Remember, every inefficiency or extra cost magnifies significantly when you scale for manufacturing. And by then it’s too late…

Fortunately food science is here to rescue you from that sunk-cost fate.

Shelf life

Remember that absence of sugar and the short cooking time? That adds up to a real short shelf-life, which is related to water activity.

Sugar and salt dampen that activity (so to speak). Without them, even low pH foods can grow mold. Disgusting, yes—but some molds also produce toxins. Which can bring legal trouble on top of the guaranteed ick factor that’ll sink your brand. Can you imagine the Google reviews…?

Unless you want to trust vendors to keep your product refrigerated at all times, you definitely wouldn’t want to use this recipe for commercial purposes.

Always always always run any newly developed products through shelf-life testing. (Ask me how)

How to get a decent gummy recipe from ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s strengths are also its weaknesses. All it does is pull from what already exists online. It’s not actually creating anything truly new. It can’t determine what will work versus what will fall flat and why. It has no sense—it’s just a masterful indexer and data analyzer.

Laying aside its lack of sensory input and actual experience to focus on what does make it a useful tool—one perpetual problem with the program still is that it’s hard to know what you don’t know. Both for the AI itself and for the humans trying to train it to give useful responses.

For example, how could ChatGPT reasonably know that pectin is preferable over agar for its superior flavor release, or that pectin has a more familiar mouthfeel for westerners? We would likely have to force it to consider these issues in our original question, and to do that, we’d have to realize that they are potential problems in the first place, and unless you are a confectionery expert or food scientist, that would be very unlikely information for you to have.

That said, if ChatGPT were trained to take into account issues like flavor release, mouthfeel, flavor profiles, and so forth, it may be able to self-correct. Each new version of ChatGPT leaps closer and closer to truly useful and not just entertaining.

But in the meantime, just remember that better questions can produce better results. (Hey—just like in science!)

So this time I asked ChatGPT:

How to make the best vegan gummy using pectin & granulated sugar, a recipe that will result in gummies that actually set, with a good mouthfeel and flavor. Listing ingredients in metric weights.

And here’s what it came up with:

Ingredients:
250 ml fruit juice of your choice
10 g pectin
200 g granulated sugar
2 g citric acid
2 g vanilla extract
Optional: functional ingredient
Instructions:
In a small saucepan, combine the fruit juice and pectin. Whisk until the pectin is fully dissolved.
Add the sugar to the juice mixture and stir until it’s fully dissolved.
Heat the mixture over low heat and add the citric acid and vanilla extract. Stir well.
Continue heating the mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 107°C. Use a candy thermometer to measure the temperature.
Remove the mixture from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Add the optional functional ingredient and stir well.
Pour the mixture into a silicone gummy mold, filling each mold about 3/4 full.
Refrigerate the molds for at least an hour or until the gummies are firm.
Remove the gummies from the mold and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.
Be sure to label your gummies clearly and keep them out of reach of children and pets.
ChatGPT 3.5

This recipe looks somewhat better—but even at a glance I can tally up several issues that would prevent this from ever exceeding mediocre.

It did get rid of the extra water, which bodes well for shelf life. It also added a thermometer to the process, which is imperative when using pectin (though its heat/time ratio is a problem). And the flavor balance seems much more palatable, with vanilla added for more pronounced flavor.

But again, this recipe is still rife with problems. It would never work as a product for any reputable functional food business. And depending upon the pH of the fruit you choose, it might not even gel, though with the significant amount of pectin called for, it might also gel very firmly.

Read how I solve these problems (and more) in the next chapter of Food Scientist vs ChatGPT – in which I work with a client to develop this gummy recipe into a delicious, high-quality, long-lasting, and viable product for the nutraceutical gummy market.

Follow our LinkedIn for updates & the next installment!

Do I Need a Food Science Consultant? Summary

November 10, 2022 by Alan McClure

Quick Version (3 minutes)

So you’ve come upon a problem in your business that calls for expert help.

Remember: Not all food consultants are created equal

There are a lot of very smart and talented food consultants specializing in various elements of the food and beverage industry.

But when it comes to solving problems they’ve never seen before—even the brightest, most creative food consultants likely don’t have the training or experience to design an effective experiment to figure out exactly why your edible baked good is showing sugar bloom, or set up precise formulation trials to find the best possible recipe for your next CBD gummy release.

What should you consider when hiring a food science consultant?

There are a few things to think about, before reaching out about food science consultation.

Size/Stage of your business

There’s no hard and fast rule, but we generally work with operational companies or startups who already have dedicated budgets for R&D and want to get moving asap.

We may not be the right choice for throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Though for a fee we can help you run a formal ideation process to figure out what the best product to start with might be.

For self-funded people hoping to get started with a somewhat smaller budget, let’s talk once you’ve done some preliminary research, have a specific product in mind, and have created a viable business plan with a solid source of R&D funding to get started.

Type of project

Keep in mind that not every project needs the specialization that a food science consultant brings. For example, non-science-based food consultants can help with:

Co-packing (contract packager/manufacturer) searches
Sales & marketing
Branding

But when it comes to the following, we are just what the doctor ordered:

Edible product formulation
Technical problem solving
Facility setup and scaling
Optimizing for multiple objectives
Shelf-life or other food-quality advising

Just remember, as with anything, with food science, you get what you pay for.

High-level specialists always cost a little more—because the returns are much greater.

“I get it, food science is valuable, and I need to budget for it. But what should that budget look like?”

Budget

Every project is different, of course, in terms of time, materials, and expenses like lab fees.

If you’re in a rush, hoping for a silver-bullet solution done cheap, quick, and dirty—then we’re simply not the right choice for the job.

But if you’re on a mission to bore into the very building blocks of whatever obstacle you’re facing—and rearrange it into a stairway to lasting success, tell us here, and we’ll work on a proposal that will take your specific budget and needs fully into consideration, to find a plan with which everyone will be happy.

Do I Need a Food Science Consultant?

September 22, 2022 by Alan McClure

So you’ve come upon a problem in your business that calls for expert help. You’ve browsed some food consultants’ websites and seen a lot of exciting promises and impressive portfolios. But can they help you, or do you need a food science consultant?

Food consultants in general know a lot. And they’ve helped a lot of businesses to achieve success.

But who do you turn to when you don’t know what you need? How do you get the best bang for your buck? What kind of expert should you be looking for?

Well, like all things in craft and science, that depends on several variables.

Not all food consultants are created equal

There are a lot of very smart and talented food consultants specializing in various elements of the food and beverage industry.

Maybe they’ve worked for years at a RTD beverage company, and have a vast body of experience and knowledge, offering incredible consulting value for beverage producers.

Maybe they were a master brewer at a well-known craft brewery, and have tons of insight on fermentation and flavor balance.

Or maybe they’re a marketing genius with a knack for spotting opportunities in the food and beverage market.

But what if you want to scale your gourmet cannabis candy formulation for cost-effective manufacturing?

Or what if you want to remove the alcohol from something that normally has alcohol in it, and still have it taste incredible?

Or let’s say you have a solid customer base and you want to formulate a new product that appeals to the broadest segment of them, meaning delicious with no room for error?

When it comes to solving problems they’ve never seen before—even the brightest, most creative food consultants likely don’t have the training or experience to design an effective experiment to figure out exactly why your edible baked good is showing sugar bloom, or set up precise formulation trials to find the best possible recipe for your next CBD gummy release.

There’s nothing wrong with that limitation—after all, most food consultants don’t have a food science degree, let alone a doctorate in flavor chemistry, resting on a solid foundation of formal experiment design/analysis and sensory-science experience. And as long as they don’t pretend to offer something they can’t, food consultants are an important contributor to the world of edible production.

But the fact is, there are some problems in food and beverage production that can only be solved through rigorous food science. And that’s where a food science consultant comes in.

What to consider when hiring a food science consultant

There are a few things to think about, before reaching out about food science consultation. While we’re always rooting for your success, your situation may not be the best fit for what we do. At least not yet…

Size of your business

There’s no hard and fast rule, but we generally work with medium to larger companies or well-organized startups who have budgets for R&D.

Whether that comes from established revenue streams, or venture capital doesn’t matter as much as the drive to do what it takes to get to the root of whatever we’re trying to solve.

For some projects we may also train members of your team to run certain elements, so we can be as efficient as possible with our direct consultation time. If you have people on your team who you trust to play such a role, we have even more options available. We don’t always need to be on-site for the magic of food science to work.

Business stage

You don’t have to be a 30-year brand for food science consulting to make sense—but we’re generally not the right choice for throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.

We work with well-funded startups and generational food manufacturers alike, who have a specific challenge or idea they’re hoping to delve into deeply. Food science is about precision and investigation. Not aimless brainstorming.

For self-funded people with a good idea and no idea what’s next…let’s talk once you’ve done some preliminary research, have a specific product in mind, and have created a viable business plan with a solid source of funding to get started.

Type of project

Keep in mind that not every project needs the specialization that a food science consultant brings. For example, you don’t need a food scientist just to outsource the manufacturing of your product. There are plenty of so-called Co Packers set up to do just that, for any type of food you can think of.

Non-science-based food consultants can help with:

Kitchen-to-carton product development
Co-packing (contract packager/manufacturer)
Sales & marketing
Branding

But when it comes to edible product formulation, technical problem solving, scaling, optimizing for multiple objectives, and shelf-life or other food-quality advising—food science offers an array of tools for getting precision results and eliminating expensive guesswork.

Don’t need the power of food science? Here’s a helpful directory of food consultants across a variety of fields.

Budget constraints

Please be clear and upfront about the available budget for your project. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people try to prevaricate, hoping for some kind of price match against other food consultant quotes they’ve gathered.

But that ain’t how it works. This is food science. You get what you pay for.

It’s not worth your time for us to get deep into the problem at hand, only to balk at the project proposal price tag. We can help you make the most of your budget, and the quality of our work may seem miraculous to the untrained eye—but we can’t magically make something out of nothing, and we don’t work on spec.

Budget accordingly, and you’ll get the returns you’re looking for.

Why are food science consultants expensive?

Science isn’t simply a body of knowledge. It’s a very specific process for understanding our world by isolating variables and eliminating bias in observation.

It’s not expensive; it’s valuable.

Food science isn’t just fill-in-the-blank. Designing effective experiments requires a lot of experience and creativity. High-level specialists always cost a little more—because the returns can be much greater.

A doctorate in food science comes with more than just a fancy title and framed certificate. It represents thousands of hours immersed in the best education, labs, and methods in the world. It indicates a mind sculpted to make connections, up and down the scale.

But again, you’re not just paying for all the knowledge we bring to bear. You’re paying to access a portal to overcome any obstacle that can be pieced apart by science, from appearance and sensory analysis to molecular activity.

If you had the budget to hire a full-time food scientist with that level of training, you could expect to pay an easy six-figure salary plus benefits.

But don’t worry—a lot of food-science problems can be solved with just a few days of direct consulting, via experiment design and training your team to conduct the data collection.

How much does a food science consultant cost?

Every project is different, of course, in terms of time, materials, and expenses like lab fees.

If we want to get down to the core of the problem—which we do, right?—it’ll generally take at least a full day of investigation and research. Effective food science isn’t one of those two-hour turnaround magic shows.

We don’t waste any time, but we also don’t cut corners. Food science is a systematic approach to problem solving. There’s investigation and research, experiment design and data collection, analysis and recommendations.

Experiments can take a few days to set up. If we need to collect data, we’ll train your team to do it to keep expenses minimal if possible, but training will take another day or so, and then there is analysis and reporting.

If you’re in a rush, hoping for a silver-bullet solution done cheap, quick, and dirty—then we’re simply not the right choice for the job.

But if you’re on a mission to bore into the very building blocks of whatever obstacle you’re facing—and rearrange it into a stairway to lasting success—then we’d love to hear what you’re working on. Tell us here.