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If you're a food and drink brand and your product isn't performing the way it should, maybe the sales have slowed down or the review. Keep mentioning that the taste is not that great. I have created something to help you. It's called the flavor Blueprint. It's a free guide that based on the process I use with my clients to fix their underperforming products.
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If you're tired of guessing and you want clarity before another batch, download your free flavor blueprint. If you want to create food or drink products that actually taste amazing, get the repeat purchases and see your sales go up.
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You need the flavor strategy. I'm Manon Galizzi, food scientist and flavor expert and in this podcast I share what I've learned from helping food and drink brands create new products from scratch. Choose the right flavor direction or fix the flavors that are not working. Welcome to another episode of my 30 days podcast challenge.
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Have you been in a situation where you validate your food and drink lab sample and then you try the scale up version and wonder why? Why does it taste so different? Today we are going to talk about scaling up your food and drink product and how it will affect your product development.
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This came up in a meeting with a client recently when, when we scale up the product, the sweetness was way too much compared to the lab samples of we have validated. So don't panic if that happens to you.
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It happens all the time. You do a great job. You spend a lot of time of validating your lab sample, you contact your contract manufacturer to scale up, you are ready to go and suddenly you taste the final product and everything is off.
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The taste, the mouth feel, the flavor profile, everything is different. And that's because formulation at scale is, is not just about copy pasting the quantities, it's about the ingredient interactions, their dispersions and how things like basic taste and flavor profile affect the consistency of the product.
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So that is the reality of food and drink product development. It will happen whatever the product, if it's a drink, if it's a food, it will happen. Okay, so now let's talk about what you can do to minimize the damages and avoid buy surprises down the line.
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Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to predict what will change in the formulation when it scale up. It would be so much easier if you could predict. I mean maybe nowadays with some AI that you can train and if you add on the right data, maybe you can start to predict changes.
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But you will need to add a lot, a lot of data between the lab sample and the production sample to be able of the AI to learn and predict what can happen in the future.
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So I'm not saying it's impossible, but if you don't have this kind of very expensive software or equipment, it is very difficult. It's very difficult even for me as a food scientist being 10 years in the, in the food industry.
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And that's because it will depend on the machine, the process, the ingredients and all sorts of things. So my advice for you as a food and drink owners and founder is always to include some time and and budget in your product development pipeline to taste and tweak the recipe.
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After scaling up, I would say try to add at least two sets of testing and iterations which according to how busy your contract manufacturer is, it may actually take few months. So tweaking and anticipating for scaling up is quite a difficult exercise.
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When you taste and compare between the lab sample next to the production sample, try to estimate estimate how much it changes. Let's say for example, from the lab sample to the production sample, there is 30% increase in sweetness and there is a flavor drop of about 20%.
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That's just an example. So try to be as much accurate as possible. That will allow you first to make the right changes to your product for the next production run. Remember, your food and drink lab sample have reached the perfect equilibrium between all of the ingredients.
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The ingredients and basic taste will influence the intensity and the flavor profile of the flavoring you have added. So if the scaling up disrupts completely this equilibrium, you may need to change few things.
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So it may not as being easy as just decreasing the sweetness. So let's take that example. Let's say you find out that the production sample is 30% too sweet and 20% less flavor intensity.
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So your first reflex of course will be to think less decrease the sweetness for the next production run. But this is where you have to be very careful. You really have to think it as a perfect equilibrium. Because if you decrease too much the sweetness, the flavor profile and the flavor intensity will change and more likely the flavor will decrease in intensity.
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Because we know that sweetness boosts flavor. And if you have a plant based and a functional product full of plants and roots and seeds and all of this goodness, by decreasing the sweetness, you will realize that the base come through more.
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So all of these earthy, nutty, mushroomy, all of these notes that you tried so hard to mask because you have less sweetness, therefore the perception of the flavor is decreased. Well, therefore the base may come through more.
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So it is a very delicate exercise because you don't have the luxury of being able to do a lot of production runs because of time, but budget the project waste and what are you going to do with the product after that?
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So the more you understand the difference between the lab sample and the production sample, the better. I will also advise you to play around with the lab samples, to do few tests and understand the limits where you can do changes.
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So for example, if we come back to our, sweetness exercise, what happens if you decrease the sweetness too much? Would you have this flavor issue? Would the base will come through? So again, you understand a little bit the limit of what you can do for your production run.
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You may also have to find compromises as the production sample may never be exactly the same as the L sample tastes like. So you have to plan this at the beginning of your pipeline to avoid very unpleasant surprises in terms of time and budget.
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And because these change is when you scale up will happen. You can't avoid it, you can't escape it. It will happen. So the better you plan ahead, the less that will affect your budget and your timeline.
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As always, I hope this episode was helpful. You can find all of my tips around tasting flavors and product development in my newsletter. So don't forget to subscribe and I will see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
