During last week’s Maker Prep webinar titled “Food Science Start-Up Essentials for Food Entrepreneurs,” Sarah Masoni, senior faculty member, and research and development director at Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, distilled the principles around food science and food safety that budding food businesses need to know. Masoni has worked on a variety of brands, including Bob’s Red Mill and Keto Bites.
She covered topics ranging from a specialty food idea’s inception, to the ins and outs of how to determine its shelf life, nutrition information, safety, and more.
Included in the discussion was a review of the basic consumer packaged food types, along with the common considerations for developing a product in each category. For example, a common hurdle for canned foods is acidification and for dried foods is the removal of moisture.
Each of these hurdles will also have its own testing threshold: acidification will have an acceptable range of pH levels. Brix levels, which measure the sugar content of a product, will have a required percentage of sucrose. These levels not only determine food safety, according to Masoni, but can also be included in a formula to help determine and confirm production reproducibility.
One of the most important topics Masoni covered centered around translating a recipe into a formula.
“I always want people to remember that the formulation of your product is critical to the success of your food and business,” she said. “Not only are you going to need this formula for manufacturing, but you also need it to create the cost; the cost of goods sold will help you make decisions about how you are going to manufacture, and what ingredients to use.”
Changing a recipe into a formula often begins by converting volumetric measurements, like cups and teaspoons, to weight-based calculations. Formulas also require much more explicit directions which make use of times and temperatures associated with a specific step in the product-making process. In the formula, this means an instruction to beat an ingredient should also specify the machine to use, the speed setting, and the duration of the action, along with the temperature at the end of the step, if relevant.
To learn more about how to prepare a specialty food product for production, key considerations when formulating a product, and more, watch the webinar on demand in SFA’s Learning Center.
Related: How to Talk to Contract Manufacturers About Your Product; Available Now: SFA's 2022 Food Contract Manufacturing Resource Guide