Scaling Up: Climbing the Mountain to Development Success

By Mark Crowell, CRC


There are more than a few parallels between mountain climbing and scaling up a new product. There is risk involved and amateurs can get hurt. To avoid this, it’s important to have a well thought-out plan and knowledgeable, experienced guides to help you get where you want to go. You may call on chefs, food scientists (or “culinologists,” who combine the skill sets of both), process engineers, packaging specialists, plant production personnel, and food safety and quality control personnel to help you reach the summit.

Whether you are ready to bring a new product to market or you just have an idea you have been toying with for years, you will want to understand the critical stage of the journey called commercialization. It is often the last, steepest, most dangerous part of the climb. Read on to learn what you need to do to increase your chances of making it to the top.

Make a List, Check It Twice
No matter what your product, every project will reach that critical point where you need to figure out how to make it on an industrial scale. How you answer key questions that inevitably arise during commercialization will likely determine your product’s success or failure.

Oddly, there is no better place to start talking about success than by examining failure. Why is it that so many products don’t make the transition from benchtop prototype to full-scale production? How can something that (probably) started out looking and tasting so great in someone’s kitchen or R&D center turn out to be so disappointing in production? Knowing where things can go wrong can be an effective way of learning how to get it right.
The Product Development Process. Commercialization is the last of three stages in the development process. The preceding two phases, concept and development, must be solidly executed prior to entering commercialization for a successful launch. In the concept phase, prototypes are created and the best becomes your “gold standard.” In development, you figure out the details of how the gold standard will be made commercially, using commercial ingredients, production processes, costing and safety considerations.

Guarding your gold standard’s quality attributes throughout development is often one of the most difficult things to do. The reality is that compromises will need to be made in order to turn your prototype into a commercialized product. The trick is to figure out when you shouldn’t compromise. If the sauce on your Organic Chicken Tikka Masala calls for fresh ginger in the gold standard recipe and plant personnel want you to use powdered ginger, that is probably the wrong move. The ginger is a key flavor and powdered ginger, while easier for the plant to use, will be bitter in the quantity you need it. IQF diced ginger, however, would work just fine. Don’t allow your gold standard to become a silver standard in development and a lead standard in commercialization.

As you progress through the stages, increasing levels of scrutiny are given to various aspects of a project’s feasibility. By the time you reach commercialization, fundamental questions like cost, shelf life and manufacturing feasibility should be fully resolved. Commercialization is generally the most expensive place to deal with issues. Projects with issues that have to be resolved on the fly are inevitably over budget, late and poorly designed.

Process Design. The process design describes how the equipment is going to be used to make the product in production. A good process uses equipment well matched to the task at hand and has accurately recorded time, temperature, pump RPMs and line pressures, mixing times and all of the other processing parameters needed to yield the desired product. Sometimes equipment choice is driven by packaging, as is the case with aseptic processing. But don’t let the tail wag the dog. The gold standard prototype is the physical representation of your marketing and quality requirements. These are the considerations that should drive packaging and processing design, not the other way around.

Choosing the Plant
Many smaller and mid-sized organic brands rely on co-packers to do their manufacturing. The selection and management of co-packers is probably the single biggest determinant of final product quality. Plant selection drives available equipment and often defines the production process. Whether it will be a continuous or batch process, the kinds of pumps or other transport devices that will be utilized between unit operations, and the processing parameters established for your product—all of these things will be determined by plant choice because your business is unlikely to justify the purchase of different equipment at the plant.

Plant choice also drives batch size and production capacity. Improperly sized equipment will not produce optimal results. Also, you will often need to change your formula based on the size of equipment, especially when it comes to water, which can evaporate at an accelerated rate in larger-scale machines. Furthermore, if you have too little capacity, consumers cannot get the product. Too much capacity and the plant wastes product in start-up and shutdown, increasing the costs of production. Alternatively, the plant may demand production runs so long that inventory carrying costs become a burden.

Parameters are also going to change based on where your plant is located. For example, at high altitudes water will boil faster and baking times and temperatures will need to be adjusted to account for the lack of oxygen. If you are using multiple plants, you will likely have to adjust accordingly for each location.

Sourcing and Adapting Ingredients for Large-Scale Production
Besides choosing the plant, you also have to find and procure a dependable supply of the right ingredients.

Getting What You Need. Ingredient availability poses a special challenge for organic food manu- facturers. Supplies are often limited and must be contracted for in advance, sometimes by as much as a year for specialty crops. Ingredient specifications are sometimes looser than they are for conventional ingredients, thus making the final product formulation more variable than it otherwise would be. Ingredient costs can also be more difficult to nail down.

Avoid High-Maintenance Ingredients. Another challenge is making sure that the ingredients are functional for large-scale processing. For instance, one small-batch formula called for breadcrumbs, but during manufacturing the breadcrumbs absorbed too much water and were too challenging to source. In the commercialized formula, a more predictable, easier-to-source organic starch was brought in to sub for the breadcrumbs. Using dry or powdered ingredients—now available for everything from honey to vinegar—in certain circumstances can also make things easier and can offer better consistency, but just make sure you don’t compromise the quality of the end product.

Size Matters. Often ingredient choice comes down to particle size. Particles that are too large tend not to mix homogeneously. Also, certain particle sizes may not work well with the processing machinery. For example, a company was originally using a specialty sea salt on its chips, but during scale-up, the large sea salt particles would fall off the chips during tumbling, the typical method used to salt chips. The supplier could not grind the specialty salt small enough, so the chip company had to spend a lot of time seeking out an alternative small-particle sea salt that didn’t contain anti-caking agents (most of which are not allowed in organic production). Since specialty salts have distinct flavors, the ingredient substitution changed the final product somewhat, but was needed to take the chip to commercialization.

Experiment with Processing Aids. Lastly, while you probably would not use these ingredients in a kitchen, when going into commercial food processing it is important to get to know your organic certified and organic compliant “processing aids,” which can help with texture, volume, density, shelf life and emulsification. Conventional processors use a long list of hard-to-pronounce processing aids, but organic suppliers have come up with healthy alternatives such as inulin (a prebiotic fiber that adds volume), natural preservatives made from organic rosemary or acerola cherry, rice bran-derived flow agents, emulsifiers and more. Another development in food technology is encapsulation, which allows key ingredients to be released at a specific time during processing.

Other Important Items to Address When Going to Mass Market
Packaging. Proper consideration of packaging requirements must be integrated into the entire development process. Too often it’s an afterthought, and such poor planning can delay the entire project. For example, one company didn’t start looking for the microwavable tray needed for its organic frozen entrée until the project was in commercialization. Because a custom size was required, a 16 week manufacturing lead time plus time for R&D were required, putting the launch 3 months behind schedule. The functional requirements for new packaging equipment and packaging materials must be defined precisely, accurately and completely if commercialization is to be accomplished with economy.

Specifications. How do you assure you are getting what you paid for? Through specs, and this applies to both your ingredients and your final product. At the end of commercialization every product needs to have a product manual, a “Bible” for the product. It will contain specific details on ingredient specifications, the product formula, the processing conditions and the quality-control and quality-assurance procedures for the product. The plant manager assumes full responsibility for continual production of the new product once it is fully commercialized. This generally occurs between the first and fifth production runs as operating conditions and processing details are worked out.

Intellectual Property. A surprising number of organic brand owners will answer “yes” when asked if they own the formulas to their products. In truth, many don’t, but think they do. Unfortunately, they don’t find that out until they want to leave their co-packer! The “formula” they may have is often just a benchtop recipe. It bears no resemblance to the actual commercial formulation. They have no ingredient specifications, nor do they have the processing parameters used to make the product. Finally, they don’t possess the analytical values that define the finished product and are a necessary part of the product’s specification. If you (or your representatives) aren’t playing an active role in the commercialization process, it is doubtful you will have the information necessary to audit the quality of your product once it is made or change manufacturing facilities should that become necessary.

R&D Costs. The escalation of research and development costs, particularly in technically difficult commercializations, can be a cause of poor financial returns—a kind of product failure. Costs need to be evaluated regularly during development to prevent their escalation, particularly as you enter commercialization, the most expensive stage of the project. One way to control R&D costs is by using a stage-and-gate development model. This process places an explicit management review of costs and a necessary approval gate between each stage of the development process. Sometimes additional approval gates are added to larger projects. Explicit benchmarks or metrics are often developed prior to the start of the project so that progress can be measured objectively as each approval gate is reached.

Quality (QA/QC). In commercialization, quality standards are developed for the final product as well as for the intermediate stages of production. Those quality standards define the benchmarks the product will be measured against during and after production. Standards applied during production are called quality control, or QC standards. Examples include net fill or net weight measurements, dud detection on hot-fill products, packaging checks, viscosity, brix, pH and organoleptic evaluations. When these types of quality checks are applied to manufactured products they are Quality Assurance, or QA checks. Metrics should be developed for each critical dimension of the product’s performance during the commercialization process. This effort largely determines your ability to control and measure product performance. Many products that start off with excellent consumer acceptance die a slow (or not so slow) death due to the lack of measurable standards. The tendency of any process that is not regularly measured is to become more variable over time.

Food Safety. Food safety is largely designed into the product during commercialization. Each step of the product’s manufacture, from initial receipt of ingredients to final qualification checks on the finished product is defined within the product “Bible.” Every aspect of the product’s manufacture must adhere to plant GMPs, state and federal regulations including organic standards, HACCP and on-site lab analysis used to monitor quality standards. Food safety is part of the QA/QC process. It is also a dimension of product quality. Food safety is almost always the responsibility of a dedicated Quality Team within the plant. If the plant has an R&D team, it will most likely be managed by the same executive responsible for supervising QA because the two functions are so closely linked.

Food Plants Are Not Big Restaurants
There are significant differences between the skill sets and experiences of personnel that complete the commercial development process and those of the typical home cook or even professional restaurant chef. Commercial products must be safe with respect to all hazards of public health significance and be designed to survive the entire distribution chain and have a good shelf life. The chef’s product merely must be cooked and eaten within minutes of preparation.

Traditionally, food manufacturing didn’t employ many culinarians. Food plants were populated largely by food scientists and microbiologists who knew how to make things safe to eat and understood food chemistry but not necessarily flavor, texture and appearance. With an increased interest in better-tasting foods, a new type of culinarian has begun to evolve, combining a knowledge of culinary arts and food science. These individuals are called culinologists, research chefs or culinary scientists, depending upon their academic training. What they all have in common is their knowledge of industrial-scale food manufacturing—the machinery used to convey, assemble, cook, chill and package the food as well as the effect that machinery has on the food. A small number of these individuals now specialize in the commercialization of organic foods. Organic foods present a number of special challenges beyond those already discussed that are related to organic ingredient restrictions, availability, functionality, shelf life and other issues unique to compliance with the National Organic Program (NOP).

Another difference between commercial plants and restaurants is that commercial plant operations must keep within well-defined product cost limitations. High cost ingredients used in many restaurants (or even at home) would prove too expensive for commercial products. Furthermore, commercial plants have the extra expense of labels, packaging, transportation, labor, advertising and promotion, as well as the costs of support systems, such as quality control, plant maintenance, and plant sanitation. Restaurants have fewer of these expenses, and those they do have are on a much smaller scale than processors' costs.

Critically, products in-process must conform to certain specifications with respect to density, viscosity, particle size, uniformity, thermal properties, and many other variables required for reasons of safety, product uniformity, quality, and the ability to be handled well on high-speed lines. The variability accepted in restaurants would never be acceptable in the retail marketplace.

Finally, commercial products must meet the needs and expectations of a wide variety of consumers—not just the chef’s taste. No matter how good a cherished recipe is, to commercialize it and have it meet the needs and expectations of a large group of target consumers, at a price they are willing to pay, requires thorough research and development—and astute management and execution of the commercialization process.

Mark Crowell, CRC, is the founder and principal culinologist at CuliNex, a consultancy specializing in the development of organic and natural food products. Mark is the former director of product development for Olive Garden Restaurants and Starbucks Coffee Co. CuliNex specializes in assisting food manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and multi-unit foodservice operators achieve their growth goals by developing and bringing successful products to market. You can reach Mark at mark@culinex.biz.