Episode 1: Research and Development - The Process From Idea to Shelf

[Music] Welcome to Food Products FAQ, a podcast where we discussed how we make food products and a step that takes to make yours. I'm Adam E, an AbriChel. And we're both independent food consultants who've been through the food industry for over a decade and we're here to share with you how we make great food products that've been sold in thousands of stores. In our first episode, we are going to talk about research and development, which I would say we both are research and developers or I think as we say in the industry, product developers. Yeah, R&D Folk, Food Technologists, Food Scientists, whatever people want to consider us. I don't mind, you can throw whatever title, I've held so many different titles. And I'm sure you did too, Adam. Yeah, my eyes were CTO, which is a Chief Technology Officer or I call a Chief Technical Officer. I think the issue with labeling CTO as a company. One, it's good for funding. It just separates you as a technical expert. But two, you get a ton of cold calls from tech companies who specifically are selling to quote CTOs to buy their software or whatever be a set they have. Yes, yes. Yeah, especially if you in the Silicon Valley or San Francisco Bay Area, who are you going to bombard you nonstop. All they do is they look up CTO and that's it. They don't do much research behind it. Yeah, so I would say 50% of my emails as civil foods were tech companies asking to improve my CRM or something. Did you pour it it over to your CEO? There. Something now I don't know. He gets those two. So that's the issue. That's kind of the issue with small businesses that so should be labeling some as a higher and affordable role. Like these guys will scrape these, they'll scrape us. They will be caught in their scraping data machine and then they'll just send emails without any regard. And I say it's getting worse because of AI. Oh my. Well, we do a different type of R&D. And it's very interesting. It's how I work in terms of R&D and how Adam works in R&D are similar methodology, but different in how we set up the projects in of itself. And Adam, what does you kick off in terms of how you like to work with people within the realm of R&D and setting up a project and then I'll break down my methodology in three rounds of development. Yeah. So for me, I'm very fortunate to build companies in the ground up. So about better MeetCo and Silver Foods were essentially it's a simple one sentence idea. I was able to convince them to onboard me and on that and I became a founding member who can build products based on that one idea. And for those two companies in general, they begin with searching up an idea if it works. So for better MeetCo, my co-founder Paul Shapiro who wrote a book about what is it cultivated meat or meat that is grown without harming animal. FHB and idea about blending meat with plants or plants with meat and creating a hybrid product or creating a product with like maybe 50% plants, it's a 50% meat. And I was like, okay, that seems really interesting. And then we kind of focused on a sort of model. For example, we would only sell we would actually not sell meat products ever. We would sell plant-based products to meat manufacturers. And then that gave a really clear direction about what problem we're solving. And that is, can we make a product that we can sell to meat manufacturers to most likely improve their meat in some way? And we were able to successfully do that with a product called Purdue Chicken Plus. Again, our products specifically at Better MeetCo was a plant-based protein mix that could one blend into meat and prove meat in a variety of different ways. Nutritional benefits and generally, it would make it healthier, perceived healthier. But surprisingly, it is more expensive than meat, which tells you a lot. But we were able to really score this deal with Purdue farms called Purdue Chicken Plus, which we can go into a whole another topic about how ingredients can really lead into prior development of main products. So we created Purdue Chicken Plus, which is essentially a dino nugget. I think the other skews kind of fell off. But there's a dino nugget that very popular kids are out 7,000 stores and it is half vegetables that have meat. And for soba foods, we found a gap in the marketplace of not having essentially plant-based Asian products. And we realized like, okay, well, we want to make plant-based Asian products. And so we have to find a certain product that would one be easy to make, but also be resident and have a decent market size. And we found dumplings, which at the time, Miele and Laobon and some other dumpling brands were starting to gain traction. We found that that was a good idea. And we decided to make our own plant-based dumpling brand with a very Asian-American branding twist. So I would say that my method is kind of the standard two dudes in a garage trying to make something and creating something from scratch. I would say like, most people who do that don't have the expertise that I did. So generally they stumble and fall a lot. And I was able to create these projects in about a year, which usually for some people takes five years to do. So I think like me being on those projects and just building them from scratch has been pretty rewarding. So that's kind of my experience. I have a bit of a more deeper experience than, right, I think you more mostly handle with clients, right? Yeah. I mean, I've done a double tier in there in the industry a little bit just to get my hands wet, but part of the time in industry was actually working for consulting firms like Matson and Things of That Nature. So they have a bit of more of a structure in how they want to move along. So what I typically like to do is after learning from Matson Helmsman Group and other consulting firms, I like to synthesize what I've learned and be able to make sure that there's a better methodology in working with my clients. So I like to go through three rounds of developments, especially if we're looking to R&D stage. And the first round of development essentially is what I call concept developments. And in concept, it's about looking at the marketing brief or making an assessment around the marketing brief and being able to figure out what kind of idea you have or concept you have whether it's already existing in the market for reformulation purposes or new product developments. We just want to be able to conceptualize it and actually put it into something that's more tangible. And that could take easily hundreds of iterations to try to understand what exactly somebody is looking for because we don't read minds at the end of the day. What we have to understand is what are your parameters? It could be a marketing parameters, branding parameters, allergen parameters, nutrition parameters, cost parameters, sensory parameters, you name it, the list can go on. But not only that, understanding the priorities to set parameters. As we could end up going around in circles and what we want to do is want to minimize going around in circles. So we want to best set the communication standards. The priorities to set parameters allow me to understand what exactly is your decision making. Do you prioritize as your number one cost over flavor or flavor over shelf life? Things of that nature that helps actually narrow down the scope in terms of how many iterations we could go into but should actually refine and focus our attention on. I start to say that we can't reprioritize. We typically save the reprioritization at the end of each round when we go through a product cutting in of itself. And so that's just round one. And I'd say you're about 50% of the way to a finished formulation at the end of round one. Round two is what I call refinements or validation is what some people might call it. We go through a lot more iterations taking from the lessons and the feedback from round one of developments. And essentially we go through the entire process all over again but more focused. Let's say we gave you six different iterations. Version A, you like the sweetness but you don't like the cost of it. Aversion D as in dog, you like the flavor, you like the cost but you don't like the nutrition. Can we somehow synthesize those two or hybridize those two from our learnings in the past and create something that's getting us closer. So that's why we're trying to achieve in round two in the refinement stage. And again we go through another product tasting. You go through understanding the parameters checking off as many as we can, reprioritizing or sticking to the same priorities in the decision-making of the R&D process. And then the third round of development is what I call commercialization readiness or commercialization preparation. Essentially you're getting to a 90 to 95% of a finished formulation. So we're going from 80% of a finished formulation in round two to a 90 to 95% formulation. Same process as we have done earlier but why is it that we're looking at a 5 to 10% deficit? The main reason is things don't necessarily scale linearly when you're at the contract manufacturing or manufacturing facility in house. The reason is salt, sugar, flavors, natural flavor, is vanilla extracts, things of that nature acid. They don't scale linearly. You don't just multiply. by a thousand fold and expect it to be the same flavor profile. You have to make those minute adjustments at scale so that you're able to scale so that you have a commercially viable formulation in of itself. I also want to infer that process is also very important thing for scaling to because some machines are different from your home kitchen. Quite impressive. Or exactly. Yes. I mean, ovens using a kitchen oven at home is not not the same. I mean, there's tunnel ovens, there's rotating pan ovens. I mean, it could get really hot in the ovens at a commercial level that you cannot achieve. I mean, you're looking at a simple comparison of can you make a good pizza crust or pizza dough into a pizza at scale. The answer is it's just different processing parameters, different pieces of equipment that it's very hard to achieve at home unless you're trying to build out your own, you know, brick oven and things of that nature. Yeah. I mean, and even then, a brick oven is much different from like let's say a seven chambered like rolling of it, right? Like exactly. It's just these when you deal with the, especially contract main factors, they're going to have a certain way of doing things. And I think that's important to put up front is that your formula is probably going to change or your product is probably going to change as you scale it. Like no questions about it. Definitely. So Adam, given that you have a different methodology than I do, what are you looking for or how do you set up reports and communication with with your clients? Yeah. So I think I'm testing a new method right now because I don't have the consulting experience you do in terms of like client communication. And basically what I've learned is that one, the people I work with are modular and they really can't afford R&D in such an extent as other companies. And it is hard to communicate the value of research and development to them because this kind of is a luxury to spend on it. And I think that I personally like actionable reports and just working just close to a founder like a co-founder, the idea of being very communicated to them about this is what we had to look for. And this is what they're looking for is really important. So just by scaling these from zero to one, there's a lot of, there's a lot of gaps that I've seen at least now working with clients is that some of it will discuss later in the episode about weights and volumes and all that. But another one is about what other people look for when they communicate for your product, especially in a manufacturing level. So for example, a co-pactor relationship, which we all get to way deeper into the other episodes is a lot more about the relationship and the value they bring versus value you bring. And that's a communication of that rather than just a one-stop shop, make my product and thank you. Like there's a lot more communication involved. So that's what I've seen a lot. So I tend to have my process really modular and very kind of forgiving in terms of how you communicate these things. And what I always believe is that like there are certain things that we do as scientists that are kind of clear as day. And for food entrepreneurs, they work in a black box. It is very hard to get the information unless you get to the specifically the contract manufacturer point. I think starting early about understanding what scaling looks like or what manufacturing in a larger scale looks like, I think is actually fundamental in terms of having your business succeed. Because it will, what it will allow you to be not stuck in your ways as you can use selling your products. But it will also kind of have you understand just how the whole industry works because this is the standard way the industry works is a factory makes your food product. Here, getting into this type of industry is consumer packaged goods, fast moving consumer goods. It's very interesting because not a lot of these contract manufacturers advertise themselves. So there's a large amount of contract manufacturing that's happening within the United States. But people don't know. They don't know how. They don't know where to look. I mean, some of it you could kind of assume if you watch how it works or food factory and things of that nature. Some people might be able to assume if they're able to get some sort of tour of some sort of factory. But a large amount of it is not easy as let's go to a kitchen and as you scale it up from there, if you're in a baked baking industry and baked goods that are similar equipment that you find at a commercial kitchen space with commercial bakery space, but it's not necessarily the same. It's unless you are in the industry and have been around these tours and facilities, understanding scale up, it's very hard to conceptual. It's very hard to grasp. So there's this idea that people have and they're trying to get to that end goal. And what we're doing in the R&D is not just sitting around on the bench and just making iterations or products over and over and over again. We're trying to figure out how do you translate this as a whole language, if you will, like a technical language. How do you translate these ideas into something that is cost effective for you as a business owner, but also scalable at utilizing these types of machines that focus on specific tasks. It's not like you're at a kitchen, or you have multiple people that can do multiple tasks. It's not like a robotic arm. It's more about a very specific machine that only heats to a certain degree or certain temperature, or a specific mixing or specific dicing. And each of these parameters in the process give you a very specific results. It only heats to a certain temperature. It gives you a specific mesh size or granulation size or dice cut size. And it's very consistent in that capacity. Yeah, I've been saying this a lot recently, but we make products with the end in mind. And I think that's a very important thing to establish is that the end in mind is generally working with a way to make thousands to a millions of your product in a single relation, you know, consistently. And I think that's something that is hard to grasp for a lot of people. But in general, actually, the systems for making a thousand is pretty much the same as making 10 if you have the right system in place. Right. Yeah, I remember Adam, you have a lot of bar experience. So you can also speak a little bit about this too. But I remember early in consulting, there's doing a lot of different bars with protein bars, granola bars, etc. People who will make bars at home, like the slapping method, they can kind of surmise it. But for the most part, people just put it on to baking sheet trays and kind of cut it out themselves. Yeah. How they cut it out ends up being more square, shinshape or a blong or not necessarily a fine size and other people, they just kind of mold it by hand. And so what's very interesting is trying to be able to walk through these clients and say, well, let's think about it in terms of machines. What can you mimic at home in terms of rollers, in terms of dividers and how to replicate the size? And some parts of it is just talking to a contract manufacturing in terms of how they're set up. But in others, it's being creative. How do you extrude a product at home? And the best that I come up with is looking at a jerky gun or some sort of, I think jerky gun is probably the quickest in terms of extrusion or the most cost effective cheapest. Yeah. So actually, that brings up a good example. Early in my career, I've dabbled in a little bit or talked a lot of people about protein balls, specifically like ball shaped protein bars. And I think this is a great example because it tells you kind of the disconnect between a home kitchen and manufacturing is that protein balls are really easy to make because you make a protein bar mass and you literally roll in your hands. However, that is extremely difficult to translate into a manufacturing setting. And people are so adamant of having the ball shape because it is kind of corded their brand. And I find that kind of, it's an interesting dynamic. But I think it's a great example of just not understand the end in mind or being inflexible to change a shape for a better outcome. Yeah, I agree with that. I remember also worked on the ball project so many so many of those protein ball projects use. Yeah, I think it was like what, 2017, 2017 around that time. It's just people wanted it. I knew foreign factor. People were tired of the up long rectangular shape or even squares. And I was taking a look at market research and just buying some product analogs. A lot of these balls, if it's individually wrapped, end up being flanned over time because of their weights. Unless you have a specific packaging mold or tray that holds its shape, it was very hard at that time. And still hard to this day for if it's single serving without that mold. And really it ended up being instead of a sphere shape, it was more of a nice cream. - Oh, if you will. - Oh yeah. - Oh yes it is. - So I thought it was like, it was a good representation of, this is what happens over time. I think another thing to point out is, we have to consider how much time these products are sitting on the shelf or sitting in a warehouse and the whole supply chain in of itself. Because a lot of consumers take product or buy product from the store or wholesale and it takes easily three months sitting at the warehouse before they actually buy it. And so a lot of my clients don't realize that we're not just making product and selling it right away. There is a shelf life to this and we need to consider what happens to the shape, what happens to the flavor, what happens to the food safety and the quality, what happens to the products at the end of the day and that's why we have to also translate is, we're not necessarily just, we're not chefs. We're not just gonna create something and serve it to you fresh type of situation. What we're trying to do is be able to understand what are the long-term implications within this package or packaging that may hinder harm or benefit this particular and products. - Yeah, I was really, we think very holistically when it comes to food and specifically packaged food that will be stored in a period of time, that is something that we put into account quite seriously. So Ryan, I mean, we talked a lot about the scaling at the end of mine and it's from those five companies I've worked with quite intensively. There is a standard way of formulating a product or essentially putting an excel sheet up and putting three columns up, three or four columns. I'm sure you know what that is. So in general, food scientists work in excel sheets and for specific columns. And I'm just gonna say I'm right here. It's the ingredient we're using is column one. Where we get it is column two. The percentage is column three and then the actual amount that we wanna test is column four which is generally a function where you multiply the percentage with the amount of grams or pounds you wanna test. Am I correct? - Yes, yes. - Yes, absolutely. - Yes, absolutely. I'm so smart. - Industry's done. - Done is. - Yep. Our subject matter expertise right here. - There you go. - Yeah. - Every, okay. And just let you know everyone, everyone does this. Like every single food scientist on this and follows this method to a tee. - Yep. - So why is that important then? - Yeah, it's very important because you wanna know who your supplier is, like where you're getting your ingredient from. I mean, it's as simple as understanding what kind of salt you're using because if you're talking to a salt supplier, let's say you talk to Mortons, for example. They have so many different types of salts. You have sea salts, you have reduced sodium salts, you have kosher salts, different granulations, different flavor profiles, iodized salts. You wanna know what kind of salt, what kind of granulation and who the supplier is. That's first and foremost, pretty important in of itself. Like it's transparency. We wanna be as transparent to you, but we also wanna understand where we're getting our ingredients from so that we can understand how to utilize those ingredients. So supplier information is very important in relationship to the ingredient of itself. Percentages are very important because that's how we think about scaling, going up or going down in terms of scale. It makes it easier for us to kind of change the percentage and have everything add up to 100% so that we'd be able to understand the batch size and any changes that are happening in the iterative process in product development. So, if we're to make a minor adjustment, we wanna understand what does that impact do? It's not just as simple as, oh, if we increase 0.1% of salt, that's it. Well, if you're increasing 0.1%, does the whole or the rest of the formulation also adjust slightly or are you decreasing another ingredient by 0.1% to actually meet the 100%. And those are two different strategies and two different approaches as well. And then the batch size is just understanding, how we can create small enough batch size to send samples or multiple batch sizes to send samples to you as a client. - There are definitely two camps for adjusting formulation and we're gonna get, this is essentially iteration. And I think one is adding an ingredient and kind of normalizing the prior ingredients percentages or like let's say a common one I do usually is take 2% to 5% out of something and replace the 2% to 5% of something. So still equals 100% and you have zeroed out stuff. And I kind of use both sometimes, but at least with working at motif food works, a lot of the PC scientists there were mainly focused on essentially taking out, like let's say, you have too much water in the form, taking out 5% water but you have to add something back in to equal 100%. - Definitely. I think as you go into more refinements and commercialization preparation, it becomes easier and fewer and there's fewer variables to be able to do that method of taking something out and replacing with something else or substituting with something else. In a concept stage or working with, you say chefs and whatnot, because there's a lot of moving parts, it becomes a little bit easier, especially from the concept to just say, all right, let's just add things in or take things out as a whole and see what that looks like. From a culinary perspective that makes a lot of sense, just to say, we're just trying to get an idea out. Whether or not it's cost effective, whether or not it's tasty, we just want to just stand what that looks like. And I personally prefer the first method, which is to take something out and to replace it with something else, just because you're going to a one-to-one replacement. You're narrowing down your scope and being able to communicate. Very reasonably, we took something out, we replaced it this way, and this is our reason why. And that makes it easy for a client to understand. Yeah, and I always tell clients, specifically that they really want to be involved in the bench process, always recourse what you're putting in and try to associate a weight with it. In fact, it's probably a requirement to associate a weight with it because then we could at least backtrack and figure that out. But if they don't report it and it tastes really good, then that's probably lost forever because it's going to be really hard to recreate that again. Exactly. I mean, there's so many different ways to make a very tasty recipe, but that tasty recipe is more by feel. And that's more what culinary arts is. But if you're working the realm of manufacturing, if you're working in the realm of fruit science, you don't go by feeling. You gotta go by weights. You gotta have a golden standard and things of that nature. For sure. Yeah, and to segue to golden standard, this is how I generally formulate products, especially if it's just essentially a prompt, like just says, "Make this, it has to be this." For example, "Make this dumpling, it has to be plant-based and tastes like meat," for instance. For so-called foods, that's one example that resonates clearly in my mind. So a gold standard is a head, it's the market leader, I would say, of a product that you are essentially inspired from. Like, as much as we like to say, all of our ideas are super unique and cool and unreplicable, that's probably not true. You were probably inspired by some product on the shelf. And honestly, getting a gold standard or understanding and researching a gold standard tells you that there's a viable market, that someone is gonna buy a better version, which you're gonna probably make of that gold standard. And that's why we kind of do that, because we at least have something to anchor from. And I will say this, food product development is pretty easy to replicate if you know the right things to do, because everything is legally has to be put on the package. So nutrition facts is essentially a puzzle piece and in ingredients statements, they have to be in ascending order. So the bulk of it has to be shown as the first ingredient and then it goes smaller and smaller. Did I say ascending or descending? I forgot. What is the right thing to correct me again? Is it descending order or ascending? - It depends on how you read it. If you read from the bottom up, then it's ascending. But if you read it from first ingredient to the last ingredient, it'll be descending. - Well, okay, I read it. - Basically the idea is, the by weights, the heaviest ingredients is the first ingredient you'll read. And then anything that you read after and sometimes you'll see 2% or less, that means that the ingredient is overall very, very small by weights comparatively. So it's gonna be important to utilize weights in grams or pounds or whatever mass you want and not by volume, 'cause that's why it makes it easier to translate this nutrition label or back panel into something that's more viable for our formulation. - But basically what we do is, once we take a gold standard, we create this really fun puzzle, in my opinion, of a backtracking and understanding how this product works and ticks and for food specifically, it's really easy to do that. And, well, it's not easy, but it's fun. I have a lot of fun favorite version of engineering. That's what I'm gonna say. But yeah, so, and then, you know, your unique selling proposition, USP, is what's going to change that gold standard. in some way, shape or form. And then we would, let's say, turn this meat dumpling into a plant-based dumpling, we would figure that out from there. Maybe we use another gold standard for something else, or we'll just rely on our expertise or the people we know to solve that problem. And then after that, I believe that is kind of the iteration stage, which then gets into, present it to your client. Tell me how you do product cuttings. - Yeah, in terms of product cuttings, it depends on how big the client is. If I deal with a more established type of company, Fortune 500, et cetera, we're definitely gonna have some sort of sensory evaluation presented to them that could be as easy as a Google Forms type of situation. Oftentimes it's like a jar question, but we'll go into more detail about sensory, but that's one particular component is, there's some sort of sensory evaluation. Here's some sample iterations, a blind taste test for the client themselves, and then also being able to provide in real time some sort of deck, and that deck would say, this is our costing of things. This is our nutrition labels for comparison of things, and these are our formulations. These are the changes that we've made, but we only present that after they've done a sensory evaluation or after they have tasted it and said, we like product X, and we also like product Z for these reasons. What we don't like about product X versus product Z is XYZ explanation, and then we go around and say, okay, well you liked X because that's the best in terms of cocks, and that actually matches our lines with the nutrition behind it and things of that nature. And so we go down very granularly so that people can understand without a bias in hand, what they're looking for is conceptualized internalized and tied to some sort of market analysis, their marketing brief end of itself. And we basically are challenging their notion of whether or not they want to follow the same strategy that they set forth or reprioritize, so that they are happy, we're happy, and the consumers at the end of the day that we're trying to sell to are happy. - Indeed, so I've worked in pretty big companies that do do sensory testing as well, and from what I've understood about how they work is that they're doing a risk mitigation technique, so they need to make sure the product is good before they launch pretty much, and they need pretty good feedback to figure that out, and they need quantitative feedback to figure that out. So, we'll dive into it in a later episode, but sensory testing is a pretty rigorous and important field. It is a very statistically heavy field, but it is really important in terms of understanding both in a qualitative and quantitative way, your product and how to improve that product. For a smaller guys, specifically either starting your own company or working with essentially someone who only sells to maybe a few hundred stores, it is a better decision to get maybe just a few of your friends to try it. I do think quantitative feedback is important for a cellbo food, specifically, what we did was, because we knew our target market was in California, we would just host a really fun event where we had essentially our demographics, which were mostly our friends, try the product, and really give some feedback on it. I think designing a form is really, I actually really love designing survey forms, and I think if you have the right survey form, you can answer the right question to give you the right direction going forward, and then generally, if us too were in a room, we would try to product, we would try it enough times, where we would be convinced is the best product in the world. But once you expose it to other people, that becomes a different story, or there are some hunches you have that can be validated when even five to 20 people try it. And for these sort of smaller companies, like just having five to 20 people, I would say 20 is a sweet spot of a good survey. Well, tell you what you need to improve on for this product. Basically, what I'm saying is that you don't have to spend a lot of resources, especially if you're small, and especially if your market's not that big, to get valuable feedback from a product. Definitely. When I was working early on when Child Time started, the main word was lean, being lean, the lean methodology. So essentially, when I speak about sensory for those who are startups, scrappy, small-medium businesses, entrepreneurs, individuals, what I would tell them is, if you are trying to capture some sort of market, reach out to as many people as possible, who are willing to buy the particular products, and you can actually have small samples, validate that way. Friends and family could be fine. It's not the best of results, 'cause you might have friends and family telling you all of it's good, but just try to send it out to as many people as possible, and just ask general questions as in, on a scale of one to six or one to seven. How likely do you like this particular ingredient or products at the end of the day? It's kind of an easy preference test to kind of allow you to get outside of your box. And either it confirms or makes you rethink about your priorities and your strategy. What makes it easier is if you happen to go to events or you set up events, pop up events are really stronger. - Demos, demos are actually like that. - Yeah, and that allows people, just walking down the street, pop up some things of that nature to actually just buy the product and give you real-time feedback. That real-time feedback gives you an instrumental amount of information that is necessary to inform how product development or how R&D works moving forward. - Yeah, and I actually, I think it's a good point. And for certain small businesses, honestly, sales is your best data point. If you're a product, if someone is trying your product and they do not buy your product, there's a gap there. Whether it can be a target gap, they just don't wanna afford it, and there's not the right person who would eat your product. So generally what I've seen through demoing specifically is that in a certain area, in a certain subset and at a certain price point, if they try the product, they will instantly buy your product. And I think that's a very strong resonance point when you do demoing or when you do sampling, especially live. - Definitely, and that's the key thing is, if you're able to have people buy your product and then you're able to replicate them as a repeat purchase, then you have proven some sort of viability, some sort of market fit. It's not the right market fit because it's just very early on, but there is traction. And I think that right there is, if you're looking at just from a very lean approach, is instrumental for you to provide constructive feedback or unless of course the food synthesis is also there to also just witness in real time. Okay, these are the changes that we should make because people are making suggestions that are like, "Oh, I didn't like it or why did I not like it?" It's because of XYZ reason. And then you make those adjustments as you go on to the next round development or the next stage of iteration. - Great, yeah. So you know, you can iterate as much you want and you know, you can do that, but how do you actually approve your product to go forward, especially in your clients? - Yeah, at the end of the day. So I break it down into these three rounds of developments and what we wanna do is come to some sort of decision. That meeting end of itself is for us to kind of focus so that when we go to round three in the tasting, you're presented two options. You either pick A or pick B, we go through as many of the checking off points in that marketing brief. Like we've achieved, say, 11 out of 17 components in that marketing brief, hitting the specification that you're looking for, and say version A, and then version B, we've hit 15. And so we can present all that information over, it's just building that trust for them to say, okay, this is, I like version A over version B because of these reasons. And it could be a flavor component based off of their priority. And when we have all of that kind of set and they understand the risk necessary to say, this is what we're gonna stick with right now and we're ready to scale. That's when we're able to transfer into that approval stage and move on to commercialization end of itself. So it's more of an age-gate process and just kind of walking them through, it's like, we have to keep moving in a direction. And the best I try to do is set them up for success in making sure that they are making some sort of decision. This is what we don't wanna do is kind of gridlock ourselves in a paradox of choice 'cause then we're not gonna go anywhere. But it's gonna be a cycle of do, by hurling downwards for everybody, handballed. - And if people start yelling at each other or starting to get very passive aggressive, which I've been there before. And that's why I kind of wanna ask you this, I'm mitigating, or sharpening the way to get approval. Because I think sometimes we can be kind of in this gray area and not communicate clearly about getting from point A to point B. So do you have any tips on essentially communicating well to get to an approval step? Yeah, it's built into the contract end of itself. It's built into the communication style. So during the kickoff call, we take a look over the project proposal end of itself. And we go and take a look at every single parameter. And we want to define what it means by branding parameter. What it means by nutrition parameter. We want to be able to understand priorities to set parameters that helps us understand decision making. We want to understand how they best want to communicate. Is it through text, is it through phone call, is it through email? Do they prefer reading long blocks of text? And like a word doc or PDF? Do they prefer next? Do they prefer video? You ask their preference. Sorry, I did a rough US their preference, right? Yes, I asked their preference. I asked, you know, how do you best want to communicate? Because now we're going to be on their terms of how they best understand or read. I think that's important to work with the building for the field that they all they do is power points. But maybe that's been discussed beforehand. And I'm seeing that part. So good clarification. Yeah, no, we haven't discussed that. And big consulting firms, you know, they present old school ways of here's a deck, you know, or here's just the information. But I think what's interesting is it has there has to be flexibility. Communication is flexibility. It's it's basically two parties, two people being able to discuss with each other. And it's there's that fluidity in the communication and transparency that's necessary. So sometimes, you know, things can break down. We are human. You know, this is not the science. This is a social science side of things. So building that trust is the first and foremost critical component. And then being able to bring up issues. It's like, well, unfortunately, we can't do these things because of maybe it's a supply chain risk. And I kind of bring that up in the first, whether it's a kickoff call or the first call. It's like, well, supply chain slows you down by easily three to four weeks to get a sample. That's like maybe an ube powder because ube is only trending upwards. And there's not a large supply chain. It's not a commodity within the United States. It's something on that nature. Or if they are trying to do project scope creep, then we're like, well, that's a separate project. You know, we read upon these terms. If you want, we can add it on. That's not a problem. It's more of how much extra time it takes and how that would delineate from the three rounds of development. If it's something on our end that we're at fault on the per project basis, then we own up to it. Because essentially, if I delay for whatever reason in the project development process, like I forgot about something, then that's my fault. You know, then it's not extra charge to the client. I try to be as fair as possible in that context. So it's a lot of its communication in the best way possible and how they would like to receive it. And some of it's also just taking a look at not necessarily love languages, but something to that degree. You know, like people, we haven't filled the quiz. Do you have a fellow quiz every time? No, not a quiz, but it's more like how did they, you know, that's what I read it. Yeah, there's a quiz. Like I don't ask them directly, what's your love language? It's more about-- Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to go like, oh, a physical touch. I'm going to touch-- no, that's none of that. You know, this is a food R&D. This is where there's not a me too moment or anything of that nature. It's more about understanding how do they best want to receive information? How do they best want to communicate? And if we can come to those terms and be aligned in every single meeting, every single type of communication, it could take back and forth, and it does take a bit of time. But I think that's where I focus a lot of my attention on. Is this type of account management? That translating of information is secondary, because if you can't communicate regularly or understand how to communicate, then there's no way you're able to translate to them. You know, it's going to be a lost in translation, because that person who interprets that information is not able to understand. And then if you're not able to have them understand, you can't connect. You can't translate. You can't understand how to move forward, because what's the point of parameters and priorities or decision making if you're not able to communicate? Yeah. Just FYI, I brought in my leveling, which is quality time. And for the audience out there, for the listeners, I think it's funny to say, with us, that as a whore of a firm nation, you're great. And good job, keep on going. So I just want to put that in there, because I think it's nice to say that to people. Yeah. Yeah. If it's physical touch, you know, high five of a hug. Sorry. Hat on the back. I do that over a podcast. We can't do that, but, you know, high five yourself, things like that. Yeah, go hug your dog. Yeah. I think that's pretty critical. And I don't think that a lot of food scientists really think about that a lot of consulting firms don't really think about that. They do talk about, you know, there's a trust equation if you're in the management consulting firm set of things. But sometimes it's just that human nature is what makes or breaks a lot of these projects. I think that's a great ending point about that. And unless you have anything else to add, Brian. No, I think, I mean, overall, we've covered a lot. And there is so much we can cover. But I think this is just broadly how we approach, how we think, what differentiates us as consultants to other consulting firms or consultants themselves, as well as how we differ from each other, you and me, Adam. And I think that gives a lot of insight for people who are listening or want to listen. And how do you want to work with a food scientist, R&D person, probably developer, in getting to your goals? Because it's as much about understanding the technicality of things as it is about the personal side of things. Because we are people. We have to work together to meet some end goal together. I love that. You all are getting this unfiltered, you know, we have no corporate chains attached to us in terms of what we're talking about. So you're getting the truth here, everyone. So well, Brian, I thought this was a really good episode about kind of all review of research development. And we're going to go super granular on a lot of different topics on this podcast. So the next episode will be about raw material sourcing. We also call raw materials ingredients. And you know, it's a really a lot of people who start on the food business, I'm no idea about this, which I think is great to dive into first. Definitely. And a little bit of packaging. We don't dive too much into packaging, but sometimes we have to evaluate packaging and kind of correct actions. Um, or just guide them to if you're working with a contract manufacturer, there are packaging parameters too. So indeed, again, a lot more to come, everyone. Thank you all for joining us in episode one and have a great rest of your week. Yes, indeed. Take care. Okay, I just woke up, but don't worry. I'm, I'm sharp. I'm going to get sharper as I talk. It's like an engine rolling. No worries, no worries at all. What do you do? What do you do this? What is 11 and over there? It is 11. I have a salsa, Roja project that I need to make shelf stable. It's fire roasted. So I need to check for pH. So that's pretty much what I did in the morning. Then I send out emails. So I sent a couple of emails out to you for related to dumpling. I appreciate it. It's up in Comans from PLMA. I appreciate it. Do you do shelf life in your house?