process

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!

Problem Solving with Food Science: Experimental Design

August 17, 2022 by Alan McClure

In the spring of 2022, I did some technical food-science-based problem solving for a small but fast-growing, independent cheesecake manufacturer in the Midwest.

They’d been putting out an excellent line of products for almost 40 years. But they had discovered an intermittent defect—which is one of the trickiest types of food-production problems to solve. And it had been eluding them for a while.

They’d tried getting help from other consultants, but to no avail…partially because this was during Covid and no one was willing to visit the facility. But this isn’t the kind of problem solving you can do without seeing the product up close enough to taste, and checking out the production process in person.

So I put on an N95 and took a trip to the cheesecake factory in question. What I found was an impeccably run, gleaming facility filled with proud employees doing their very best to turn out the greatest cheesecakes in the country; I was impressed by everything I saw there. But extreme professionalism wasn’t enough to solve their cheesecake defect.

Based on their own research and analysis, their quality control team had already figured out that the issue was probably sugar bloom—but they didn’t know what was causing the problem nor how to solve it.

What is sugar bloom?

In confections and baked goods, sugar molecules can sometimes crystallize on the surface. Though it isn’t harmful and doesn’t affect taste or mouthfeel, sugar bloom can mar the appearance of an otherwise perfect confection; especially for something like chocolate where you want an even, glossy sheen.

Unfortunately, sugar bloom can look like mold to the untrained eye. And that customer perception can be a big problem, leading to returns due to food safety concerns, even though there is no safety issue at all.

In fact, sugar bloom isn’t uncommon in food production, but the cause isn’t always clear. It can happen because of humidity changes, where surface moisture evaporates leaving behind fine crystals of sugar. It can also occur when you freeze a water-based product, because some of that previously liquid water is no longer available to keep sugar in solution.

Before I visited the facility, I explained what my process would entail, including certain costs associated with running a comprehensive experiment (e.g. chemical testing and materials).

They said, “Do whatever you need to do. We have to solve the problem.”

Solving the problem of sugar bloom in cheesecake using food science

Luckily for them, you don’t need an in-house professor of food science to apply high-level scientific method to your food-production process.

In fact, I only spent three days on-site in the factory, for fact-finding, experimental design, and staff training on how to gather relevant and impactful data.

Day 1

When I visited the facility and saw the actual cheesecakes with sugar bloom and tasted scrapings from the surface, I was convinced that it was indeed sugar bloom. But recognizing what the problem is doesn’t help you figure out why, and speculation isn’t science.

There are multiple ways to approach problem solving with sugar bloom, but it really depends upon the exact underlying cause. Just knowing that varying the product’s sugar and water content is relevant is simply not enough.

Even in a recipe with minimal ingredients, it doesn’t make sense to look at just the sugar and water, especially because most ingredients in a cheesecake contain some amount of water, though water itself is not actually directly added as an ingredient. So instead, we looked at each and every ingredient and relevant parts of their production process as potential variables—which is the first step to figuring out how many experimental treatments (i.e. test batches) we might need in order to find and solve the exact problem.

Day 2

We had about a dozen variables we wanted to test. But that could easily get out of hand (in terms of cost and labor) to run the number of experimental treatments required to analyze even that short list of variables.

Fortunately for the cheesecake folks, my PhD work included deep studies of chemometrics—including formal experimental design—uniquely preparing me with an almost comical level of experience, theory, and software knowhow for designing just this kind of experiment. And I did it in a more cost-effective, labor-efficient way than most of my food-science consultant peers would be able to.

Not to bore you with the details, but we optimized the experimental design using a split-plot structure that essentially allows you to efficiently test multiple variables at once, even when some of them are hard to change, and we narrowed our field by focusing on variable ranges that seemed viable and wouldn’t ruin the product flavor or texture.

Then I trained a number of their staff in basic sensory (organoleptic) analysis so they could gather meaningful data on cakes from every treatment.

To make the most efficient use of time and budget for problem solving, I set them up for testing in a manner similar to consumer analysis (where you ask untrained people to rate a few key sensory factors)—but we used a panel of their team members who were already deeply familiar with the characteristics of the products. Their familiarity allowed us to focus on precision at the level of another method called descriptive analysis, which would normally require much more panelist training (adding significantly more time, money, and other complications).

The result? More and better-quality data gathered very, very quickly.

Day 3

On the third day, the quality control team at the factory started running the test treatments. I was there for oversight, but the goal was for them to run the experiments and sensory evaluation on their own, so they could continue collecting data for weeks after I left the facility.

Using a set of analysis ballots I created for them, they rated various characteristics on a formalized nine-point scale, including liking, sweetness, sourness, etc.

And of course each evaluation must always be:

Randomized
Blind
Duplicated per panelist (at least)

Meanwhile they were also collecting samples of each treatment to send for chemical analysis in the lab.

Going forward

We planned for 8 weeks of data collection, with an initial analysis at the halfway point. Each week they sent me their sugar-bloom data, and in four weeks a clear pattern was starting to appear in the data, so I sent them a preliminary report.

Of course we continued the experiment as planned, and the final weeks of data confirmed the initial analysis. But in less than six weeks total, my client already had an action plan for eliminating the sugar-bloom defect. The rest was just icing on the proverbial cheesecake.

According to the Director of Quality Assurance: “It blew us away, being delivered a root cause backed up by data at the midpoint of the project, along with multiple viable solutions.”

Frankly most food scientists don’t have the background to set up this kind of experiment revolving around sensory evaluation—but the results are well worth it.

More about experimental design in food science

To design and analyze this kind of complex experiment effectively, you have to consider what’s called multiple objective optimization.

In this case we have two main objectives:

Get rid of the defect
Keep everything tasting the same for customers.

There may be several ways to get rid of the defect by adjusting certain ingredients—but if they change the flavor or texture of the cheesecake, they’re not very helpful.

To optimize for our needs, we look at the experimental region (using software of course, because it’s multiple dimensions deep at this point due to all the variables) to find the area within that region that solves both our objectives in the most optimal way.

This approach results in much less guesswork after the experiment is analyzed, thereby keeping the cost contained.

Problem solving with food science yields dividends

In food and beverage production, problems and defects will inevitably arise. This is especially true for functional foods where you also have variables like dosage and often bitterness. If you want to continue growing, you’ll have to solve those problems. How effectively you do that depends on where you apply your resources.

Whether you’re manufacturing cheesecake or chocolate, gummies, beverages, bakery items, etc—even minor defects can wind up costing a lot of money in the long run. Especially when you scale up production to meet your growing demand.

Though the problem for my cheesecake client was intermittent, and relatively minor from a quality standpoint—the appearance of sugar bloom could be confused by consumers and/or retailers as signs of mold. Not a good look.

Solving the problem completely and methodically will yield massive returns through the years to come, in terms of minimizing rejected product and keeping customers satisfied—all because of a small investment in forethought and food science.

When it comes to solving food science problems and saving money, more important than any niche knowledge-base is the ability to design an effective, efficient experiment based on the known variables and objectives—so you can run a thorough analysis based upon every last drop of important data.

Once you know exactly why something is happening, coming up with the right solution is often…a piece of cake.