scaling

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.

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.