Episode 9: Shelf-Life and Why Food Rots

[Music] Welcome to Food Products FAQ, a podcast where you discuss how we make food products in a step so it takes to make yours. I'm Adam Yee, and I'm Brian Chow. 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 have been sold in thousands of stores. Episode 9, we are almost to the end of this series. How do you feel? Wow, it's a lot. It's a lot for the viewers. It's a lot for us, but it seems seamless, you know? Like it's a bit of, there's enough fun in doing this so that it feels like, it feels like a lot just reflecting, but it doesn't feel like a lot when we're doing these things. So that's great. I mean, we'll, yeah, we even know this literally, we've been kind of belting this out. So behind the scenes, we literally had done an episode almost like back to back to back, right? Like every day we will hop off in here and talk for like an hour about the technical stuff that we personally love to talk about. Yeah, I mean, it feels like being an independent consultant it feels like you have a coworker of sorts and you're able to just like chat about a few things and about a few things and they're like, all right, that's good. I agree. I agree. I think, yeah, you know, it's, it's rare to, especially if you're an independent like talking to experts, right? I've worked in a lot of teams. Some were big, some were small and the ones that were technical, like at my job at Isagenix and Motifood works, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed bouncing off ideas with certain people and getting their perspective on things. So whether it be like higher ups or kind of the beginning associates, it's always good to have extra perspective just so that it actually helps the creativity juice going just to tell you challenges or to have reassurance and things like that. Yeah. I always call it the OnePlus 1 equals 3 approach. Yeah, exactly. Well, one of the questions I ask or I get asked or I ask in the early stages when I have had team members when I forget say, Gerard Dulles, chocolate company or carry ingredients or even Matt's in is about shelf life. And there's a lot of uncertainty or unknowns around shelf life within the industry and as well as outside the industry. There is some correlation to expiration dates depending on the category, but that doesn't mean it's going to be a requirement or it's not a criteria for an expiration date. So there is similarities, but it's not all the same. Yeah, shelf life is something that a lot of makers don't really quantify, I feel, especially in the early stages. They don't really know unless people complain about it if their product has gone bad. There are certain products that is much more obvious than others, right? Like let's say, milk is easy to see if it's gone bad or whereas degrading quality versus like, let's say granola, right? It's a little bit more difficult to figure that out. This episode is about not only us explaining how products degrade and what to look out for, but also the tests we do to figure out how our product degrades. And this basically is a standard of how we kind of pinpoint expiration dates and pinpoint spoilage. Yes. So shelf life can be broken down into more of the microbiology shelf life of things. So that's more about food spoilage and things of that nature. Then there's also the chemistry side of things that's more along the lines of a little bit of packaging, a little bit of processing that's kind of being involved. And also as anything that's related more, more of the supplements or more of the heavy metals or allergen type of testing. And then organoleptic or sensory organoleptic is just another word for sensory shelf life. That's somewhat something covered in the previous episode in sensory in terms of quality assurance, quality control. But we'll talk a little bit more about how sensory can work its way through the shelf life parameter here. So there's three different ways of thinking about shelf life. Yeah. I will say if you are a small maker or a small business and you can't afford a shelf life test, what most people do. I'll just say this, right? And I'll say this. Most people look at the competitive set and kind of extrapolate the shelf life. If you have a frozen, let's say smoothie product and they're like five other frozen smoothie products, you can look at their expiration dates or figure out these from digging their expiration. And you will probably be safe copying them, at least for the people who are asking for it. Until you have a shelf life test. Frozen category is probably one of the easiest. If you keep anything frozen and maintain the frozen supply chain or the cold chain is what they call it, you pretty much have an indefinite shelf life. So long as there's no temperature differences in a freeze and then thawing cycle in transportation or mismatchment of in the inventory at the retail location, let alone just any logistics in of itself, you should be fine. Like you should have practically indefinite and you can just look at anybody as competitive set and kind of copy them. It's probably your easiest. When you're looking at shelf stable products, it really depends on the category because it's less on the food safety component. It's more likely going to be if you do the processing right and you find the right contract manufacturer. It's more along the lines of what does the impact on the sensory is going to impact is it is their oxidation or in the chocolate industry are you going to have blooming things of that nature or things you want to consider. And then if it's refrigerated, it's a kind of a hot west. Yeah, so refrigerated. The category refrigerated is really difficult and it's, you know, you just have to be what? Two weeks shelf life in general. Is that what you've easily seen in terms of that? If you're producing out of commercial kitchen and you're laying, it's two weeks backs is what I was seeing. Most people get a few days a week. They're trying to push to two weeks. And then when you're starting to grow in size and you're working with a contract manufacturer, you're trying to push it to four or even three four weeks up to three months. So them will try to even push it to six month time frame. That's very difficult. If you're over seas or importing products overseas, they typically have a shelf life of six months or so. And then they just kind of tested out rather than a full year type of situation. So people try to go to six months just because they kind of see imported products. Having a six month shelf life, it really depends on the process. It really depends on how fresh you get the ingredients. And it depends on the packaging. I think the most important is actually the packaging itself, especially from a refrigerator standpoint. Yes. We'll definitely go into how we test out specifically the packaging for it. Funny enough, I've never actually been in the refrigerator field in food. I've always been frozen or shell stable like protein bars. So refrigerated, I'm honestly scared of it because it's just so finicky. When we look at food products specifically, and as a business standpoint, I always tell people this food is probably the only category that rods. It degrades really fast to the point where it's unusable. And therefore there's a huge layer of complexity, specifically in food. Let's say you're manufacturing pens or manufacturing like springs or whatever or even toys. Those don't rot. Those can be used for years. But food has this layer of rotting, which means that if it passes the expiration date, it is essentially has to be thrown away or heavily reduced in terms of how you sell it, which is generally a loss for you. So that I think a lot of people don't account for that really when it comes to the manufacturing, or when it comes to the business economics of food. So with specifically with food companies, we try to extend the shelf life of products. And there's many ways to do it. And some use preservatives, some you don't. And I think now the trend is you don't actually, I definitely know that I had to do a lot of projects with that. But the point being is that with food specifically, most companies will try to extend the shelf life as much as possible. So they do not have to suffer from a loss of inventory when it expires. And again, food is one of those rare categories where a good will expire. Right. Yeah, it's basically we're going to try to paint this table for you. Essentially, it depends on where the category is, is on one side. And then what kind of testing or thoughts about testing that could be done for the category at hand. Every one of them would have some sort of sensory shelf life testing. You could do it in a regular manner, which is the cheapest is once you go and finish production. You keep some of the retains for yourself and you open that package every, if it's a shelf-sable product, you open that package every month or every three months, every quarter, taste it, look at it, take pictures of it, and then you can get a sense over a year what the product would taste like if there's any changes, what the product looks like, if there's any changes, things of that nature. That's more of the sensory realm. Frozen is more or less the same thing. You're just looking at how long does it thaw? Does it perform the same if you're to heat it up again? And does it have the same flavor profile? Theoretically, it should be the same through and through for both frozen and refrigerated. Sorry, for frozen hands, shelf-sable. For refrigerated, it's just a faster approach. You're just consuming on a daily basis or on a weekly basis to see if it's maintained its freshness, if it's like a salad. I worked on a project where we made, where the founders, it's a husband and wife team. They created Persian frittadas, they call it kukus. It's out of, it's oina natural foods, they were uproaring out of laquecina, if I can recall. I think I actually saw him yesterday. Yeah. And an absolute Bay Area event or what do you call food fun? I don't know. There's so many organizations in the Bay Area. Yeah, there's a lot of organizations. So hustling. Yeah, it's not easy for refrigerated. There's a lot of bacteria or microbes that can grow like yeast and mold. And so we're testing every single week and we're testing different form factors. We're testing, like, can we freeze this? Because freezing eggs is not easy. No, yeah. Can we look into natural preservatives? Can we look into artificial preservatives? They didn't want to do artificial preservatives, but we had to test out, you know, what are all the possibilities to extend the shelf life on this? Can we take a look into different packaging parameters to be able to kind of help reduce any type of risk in terms of food spoilage? So we looked at sensory, then we looked at the chemistry behind it, and then we also looked at the microbes. Like, the chemistry was more of what happens when you add preservatives in it, whether it's natural or artificial. Does it change the flavor? Does it change the texture of things? And we found that even regardless of its natural or artificial, the amount of preservatives that was added to extend the shelf life was significantly high because it's naturally a refrigerated type of product. Which is a lot of moisture that you need to mitigate. And at the end of the day, shelf life often is looking at what moisture is available and how much of that moisture or water content is interacting with some other ingredients to kind of extend that shelf life. Yeah, I think that's a good point to understand specifically for shelf life and rotting. Water is essentially the main culprit for most products, if not all products. And manipulating water in some way, whether it's changing its state, like frozen or removing it, let's say a dry product, will see everything increase the shelf life. So it's a little tip I always give people is that if you really want to increase the shelf life, you have to find some way to manipulate water. There's a lot of science behind it. There's tons of science behind using water to your advantage or reducing it in some way shape or form. And I think that that is important to understand because, you know, a moist, let's say moist granola, for instance, will cause your prodigy soggy, right? Like we as humans can organically tell when a product does not taste good, right? Like, it's just we don't have a way to track it unless we use a shelf life or shelf life studies. And I think that that is important to understand. Like when we use water and we find ways to figure out how water affects our product, it really helps us understand the product. Like water causes oxidation, it causes microbial growth, it causes just textural degradation. You name it. And so when we find ways to reduce, manipulate or even create a barrier so water doesn't get in like packaging, this helps a lot. So it's just something I like to tell people just because I think people understand the product's a lot better. What's what's we tell them? Like this is the main culprit of why your product is is riding so fast. Yeah. And water is just naturally found everywhere. Also water is the cheapest of it. It's a lit of radiate. Yeah. Well, I mean water is in all living organisms, right? And then if you are trying to extract minerals that typically that's found here, some sort of water to make it easy to do the extraction process. If you're looking at even sea salts, I mean that's coming from water. You have to go through a dehydration step in things of that nature. So there's a lot. There's a lot of water. There's a lot of discussion around water. There's like even two things to kind of talk about when you're looking at water. There's moisture content. Then there's water activity. And then essentially what's the difference between the two? Well, moisture content just tells you how much water is available in that product, in the ingredient itself, whereas water activity will tell you how much of that moisture is available or active for that microbes to kind of use for their own growth, right? Yeah. Let's kind of break down water to be a little bit. It's a pretty sciacy term, I feel. People throw it around. It can be kind of like difficult to understand. So we're going to try our best to break it down. I'll give it a shot and you could correct me. But when we use the word water activity, it usually is a sign of something growing in there. Usually where scientists do is we have essentially a ratio and it is a ratio of essentially zero to one with it being closer to one equals bad for lack of a better term. Closer to one equals that there's going to be microbial growth on there. It's important for us because when we look into a product and see that, if we have a scale of zero to one, it helps us a lot to understand what's going on with the product specifically. For us as food scientists, we honestly have been beaten into us since freshman year of college. Well, water activity is so when we say a water activity is like one or point nine, that means your product is susceptible for essentially microbial growth, which will cause someone to get sick. And pathogens like salmonella, ecoli, listeria, those guys love high water activity ratios, like point nine. And then as you go lower, it will, you can get mold or you can get like, you know, what is the trend? You don't really, like if you're a maker, you don't really understand, you don't really have to understand too much. But when a food scientist does talk about water activity, this is kind of what it means. The higher the ratio is, the more susceptible your product is, essentially the rot. Yeah. And if you're looking at specific numbers, you want to look into shop stable products for a contract manufacturing standpoint, you're looking at 0.65 is the ideal number and below that. So below 0.65, you're getting a longer shelf life and it's, it's better for that contract manufacturer to work with between 0.65 and 0.7. That's where it's a little bit more risk for the contract manufacturer because there's variability in their environment, you know, if there's any steam or humidity, just in the natural environment that could that barrier, that room for error, basically pushes them above 0.7. And that's where you have microbial growth from a fermentation lens. Usually, I think it was a lactic acid fermentation, things like that. So usually it's a 0.65. If you operate in your own commercial kitchen, it can be okay between 0.65 and 0.7. Like you're selling the product pretty quickly, you're making small enough volume. I think that's, that's where you have a safer bet. But if you're making large volume out of contract manufacturing facility, you want a buffer and 0.65 is like that magic number. If you are fermenting, like through lactic acid fermentation, like for kefir and yogurts, then you are looking for the 0.7 to 0.8 type of number. If you are trying to grow mushrooms, then you are looking at anywhere between 0.8 and 0.9. You don't actually 0.89. 0.9 starts to become like pathogens, I think, of that nature. So there are some unique nuances, especially if you're looking through the lens of fermentation, where you do want a higher number, that you want to make sure that it's a sterile environment. So you want to sterilize that water source first before you start to inoculate and grow the micrope that you want. Yeah, I mean, for the lay people, like beer and kimchi are common ways of how we manipulate water in terms of growing good bacteria for us, not good bacteria, good microorganisms for us. That actually gives us to a good segway. about pH, which is another hugely important thing. We look at as food scientists for to make sure our product is good. And you know, pH, I'm sure you've heard it all in chemistry class where, you know, there's acids and bases. We as food scientists specifically care about acidic food. - We cannot consume basic foods. I didn't mean to add, but it tastes very bitter and then the more basic it is, it'll dissolve us. - Yeah. I always describe it as basic is essentially cleaner and self or like bleach and whatever, right? Like you're not gonna drink bleach. Like, but, you know, we can, we as humans can eat low ass or high acid foods. The reason why we're talking about these metrics right now is because they do become very important to wish health life testing. But to break it down with pH specifically is that we specifically look for low pH. I think the standard for the FDA is under 4.6. Generally people like to do 4.2 for what an industry standard is, probably 4.2. This is also a metric of how we decide if a microbe will grow in a substance or not. And the reason why we're talking about this is because, for example, making kimchi is that we manipulate the pH. So the bad microbes don't grow and the good microbes do grow. 'Cause different microbes grow in different conditions. - Yeah. - And for specifically, you can go really deep into this, but I'll just say, the good microbes will grow in a certain condition. And the bad microbes will grow in a certain condition. And we as food scientists and microvolodists have studied this extensively about which microbes are harmful for you and the parameters it takes for them to thrive. And we mitigate those parameters, almost to a zero chance. I would say two a zero chance that these would grow using our essentially food safety techniques. - Yeah. So you're learning a little bit from the food safety episode, how that impacts the shelf life is. It depends on the, again, it depends on the category, right? So like, again, this chart that we're trying to paint for you is on one side is the category and the other side is the type of shelf life that you want to think about at the end of the day. Even if you don't necessarily do the tests, the third party laboratory tests or you try to do it yourself, these are just things of priority. It impacts the sensory as well because the longer you ferment something, the flavor will change, right? A fresh fermented product is very different from a few months of a fermented product. It becomes more sour because of the lactic acid fermentation. You get more lactic acid out of it. You get more umami notes and a lot of our complexity in the flavor profiles, but it is necessary to kind of keep that in mind. This applies very well in the chocolate space because chocolate is a fermented product. This works well in some sort of breads, especially if you're using yeast. It's the longer it sits, the change in flavor will be, can be off-putting for people. And this happens at hot sauce as well, whether you're doing a fermented hot sauce or a fresh hot sauce depending on the pepper you want to ferment. Yeah, I'll say, kombucha is another one or fermented like giver drinks. I've had a lot of discussion with some kind of beginning makers about they don't want to pasteurize their product for instance and they want to keep it growing. There are pros and cons of that approach. One of the cons is that it will taste a lot different from month one to month like six or whatever, whatever the shelf life is like. I also have the main point of shelf life is to mitigate or to improve the shelf life of a product is to mitigate change. And we were mentioning water safety and pH because those things will change over time. Sometimes in a good way, some most of the time is in a bad way. We use shelf life studies to monitor these specific changes and many more changes. Yeah, so going back to pH, just because you have a set pH at one point in time, doesn't mean that pH is stagnant. So like the acid level stagnant. pH is essentially a bunch of molecules, acidic model molecules and they start to interact with other molecules in the food product. So over time, that product could be more sour than what you have established as a golden standard. So something that's made say fresh or the day of in terms of the contract manufacturing facility or your own production, maybe very different, drastically different six to nine months down the road or even 12 months down the road. And we won't know that until you actually get to that point. And I think that's something that a lot of product developers, designers and chefs aren't necessarily trained to think about because they make more or less fresh products. And as entrepreneurs, you make more or less fresh products, but you have to think about, if you can extend the shelf life of the product, you can move that product further distances, which now increases your distribution channels and things of that nature. And you're able to now sell to more people. You're able to ship it across the United States, which is massive. And so that's really what you wanna think about based on the category at hand, of where you want to grow and how you want to grow your business. - Yeah. And again, the food is the only product that rods most chefs, if we work with chefs, some of them don't have the idea, the correct idea about shelf life. So they think like making a meal will last forever. You do have to think about being flexible for the changes. There are guardrails that you can definitely use, but in general, our job is to have you understand what makes your product go bad and then give you options on how to mitigate it going bad. - Yeah, exactly. So let's jump into a little bit about packaging. I know we talked about pH, I know we talked about water and water activity. Let's talk about packaging. And how can packaging extend shelf life? - Definitely. I mean, I think the big one is that, you know, you have several of the types of packaging, you have paper, you have plastic, you have metal, which is essentially foil. What else is there? And then there's a lot of signs behind packaging too, because like, let's say your bags of salad have a different type of packaging. It's called modified atmosphere packaging. Now I notice a lot of Asian countries are selling skews that use high pressure processing packaging. And you know, there's just a lot of different types of packaging that you can use for your product. And they range from very cheap to very expensive, but they all act as barriers. And they all have different barrier properties, which also have a huge size behind them. You can even ask for something called a packaging spec sheet. And they will give you things that you are like, what the heck is this? Like oxygen, mitigate, or what? Oxygen barrier, moisture barrier and all that stuff. - Yeah, essentially packaging is the only product, non-food product, or non-food raw material, non-edible raw material, that essentially protects your food from these microbes or the environment that causes the decay or the enzymes, or whatever rate of rotting, if you will. You look at salad and salad mixes before the, I think it was before 1990s, it was very difficult to get salad mixes to maintain a shelf life of like up to like more than a month. You just had a bunch of raw produce that was sitting in a bag, with that bag collects condensation, and then it starts to wilt. But now you have these multi-bearier plastic that you commonly just find in any grocery store that allows for that moisture to kind of evaporate out a little bit, that allows for CO2 to leave, but not have much oxygen to actually enter the bag or anything of that nature. And so that's very interesting to see in the development of the packaging stage to how we're able to see so many different types of salad mixes in the refrigerated aisle. And then going back to cuckoo's, and the Persian Frataadas, it's basically looking at how that packaging can prevent freezer burn, is if you're looking at trying to freezing Frataadas, it allows we were taking a look at eliminating anaerobic or like oxygen loving type of microbes by map packaging it. We were just taking a look at everything under the sun for our first shelf stability. And then snacks. Snacks is shelf stable for the most part because of the processing, but what Adam was mentioning is like modified atmospheric packaging, that basically means you're adding nitrogen, you're flushing out the oxygen because that oxygen will oxidize a lot of snacks, you're your potato chips, your popcorn, they become stale because of the oxygen. And that's why you see a lot of these pillow pouches or even stand up pouches sometimes, like balloon up because they filled it with CO2 or nitrogen or mixture of anything that's not oxygen. They're flushing it as much as possible. And if you can't afford that process, that's why you see a lot of those oxygen absorbers, those type of sachets, like don't eat this because it's made of silica, that's where it's helping in absorbing the oxygen so that the food doesn't absorb the oxygen and you don't get like very stale or flat flavor profile type of snacks. - I think this is really important to understand because you can't do a proper shot. LFLY study without a proper packaging, right? And I've made this working mistake to do that, right? Like in the beginning of my part of my career, we used packaging that was a finalized and that was essentially the data was useless because it represented the wrong thing. And that is extremely important. You will waste a lot of money if you don't have everything up to snuff in terms of your packaging because just the properties matter so much between the packaging. I think it's fine to do a shelf life study for packaging, right? Like paper versus metal, for instance, or glass versus paper. I think that's actually really important, but in general for like a basic finished good shelf life testing, I would not skip on this. It really does matter at the end of the day, your packaging and shifting packaging. There are pros and cons for doing a full of shelf life testing just for packaging alone, but in general, like this is more important than you actually think when it comes to shelf life for your product. - Yeah. And if you're in the very early stages, your main goal is not to think about shelf life because you don't have as many points of distribution. Your main goal is to sell the product and try to find that product market fit with your MVP. As you go and find a contract manufacturer, you should start thinking about the points of distribution and how far you're shipping out the product and where it's going. And in that context, you should start thinking about shelf life. You should start thinking about what can impact the shelf life. Part of it is packaging. Part of it is the process behind it. And part of it is the ingredients you use. So those three are instrumental. And at that point, there are, you know, it does add up in terms of costs, but that's a cost you need to think about from a food safety standpoint, to think about from a recall standpoint, a potential recall if there are food safety issues, but also about your packaging and about the PR that you could get because if you have stale chips and it was improperly done or stale granola because of improper packaging, then essentially you have a lot of complaints or people not buying your product and or returning the product if it's that shelf stable type of product. You can look into accelerated shelf life versus regular shelf life. So regular shelf life just takes, you know, however long it takes one year, two years accelerated is to basically put that product into an incubator, not an incubator accelerator program, but like a third party microbiology lab has a warmer, think of it like an egg warmer for your product. - That's how you describe it. - Yeah, that's how I describe it. - You can find it on Amazon too. That's why I look up egg warmer incubator and then I get my own. I think someone was describing a tall heater as an incubator as well. I will say the etymology of an incubator for startups is from that because an incubator is a warming unit that will help things grow. And they took that idea and put that as the word incubator for businesses. So it's almost the other way around. So the point being is that an incubator specifically has metrics that which is basically moisture and heat which you can manipulate. And we also call it a jungle chamber in some instances because it represents a humid and moist environment, which is like a jungle. And this is, you know, again, these are kind of like extreme situations, but your product could be in that situation too one, but two, because we understand how, and we have a lot of scientific data that has been built up over decades about this, because we understand how heat and moisture relate to product degradation, this gives us a decent idea. It doesn't give us a perfect idea, but it gives us a decent idea about how well your product will be affected by moisture and heat. - Yeah. And, you know, that essentially the more moisture there is, basically we're testing, we're challenging. Sometimes you put shelf life into a specific type of test which is called a challenge study. You're challenging, you're adding microbes and you're challenging the environment of the microbes and your food product to see if there one can win out over the other. As in like if you're gonna be microbial free or if that microbes gonna grow. So that's a challenge study. But in some cases, like say snacks and confections, it's not so much a challenge study, it's more along the lines of how would the particular snack react in a high humid or high temperature type of environment. If it's chocolate, it's less about humidity, it's more about blooming. Blooming is essentially the cocoa butter floats to the top and it looks like mold, it looks white mold, but that's actually just cocoa butter. The texture of the chocolate and the flavor is very different. It can be very brittle, like a brick rock. But essentially if we're to test the shelf life of flavors or adding in nuts and inclusions, we just basically look at increases of temperature and seeing how that reaction works. Every 10 degrees Celsius that you move up so that in temperature, it essentially is a two time multiplier. And so if you're doing 20 degrees Celsius above say room temperature, then it's a four time multiplier. So you're doing four weeks essentially in a week life span. And that's essentially how acceleration of life can be thought about is how much temperature increases or how much humidity increases will impact the shelf life because you are accelerating what it would actually look like in room temperature through normal time frames. - Yeah, and I'll say that the accelerated is, again, not perfect. And I'll give you one example who with vanilla protein bars of specifically, which when you expose into any sort of heat or moisture in a certain environment, they will turn brown instantly. After a week of doing this, they will turn brown. Usually that doesn't happen in the retail setting, thinking I'm gonna call them months to turn brown. If actually it will turn brown, of course, because that's how mayor reaction and proteins interactions work. But with an accelerated, if your measure is specifically recolor or what it turns brown, it will not give you a good idea of what will change. So again, things can happen based off of your product category and based off of what the metrics you have and the things you're looking for. - Yeah, and if you're asking us to help with a shelf life design, in part, you could actually go to a third party microbiology chemistry lab and they might actually be able to set it up for you. But if in the case that you're looking for a design yourself, then you can reach out to food scientists to be able to kind of help out and point you in the right direction. And not necessarily all categories and need the shelf life testing, but some may. And I think the equation that we're going to use is the Aranius equation, which kind of helps out in mapping out shelf life design. - What is that? - The Aranius equation is something that's taught in like physical chemistry and organic chemistry. But that basically means is like for every 10 degrees Celsius that you increase, then you got it. - Essentially that's how you can map out shelf life, how accelerated the program is. And then the inverse is every negative 10 degrees or 10 degrees Celsius lower, you're actually looking at extension of shelf life in terms of how you're set up the experimental design. - Interesting. And I actually haven't either, I haven't heard that word a long time where I just never heard of it. Again, this shelf life is like, I just tell the third party how to do the test and then kind of work from there. Let's actually talk about that about how to communicate and structure a shelf life study. How I've done it is, yeah, I use a third party lab in general that has kind of, I think it's always good to have that third party lab. I also think they can get pretty costly though, right? Like depending on how many tests you're doing, and specifically I always say how many pools or how many time they have to take out the product and analyze it. And I think this has been the main driver of how we mitigate costs in a business perspective of shelf life testing. And I think talking about this is really helpful for small businesses that might not be able to forward like a pool every week, right? So let's say you were doing an accelerated shelf life study eight weeks and generally though it is great to have eight pools some companies cannot afford that. And what we've kind of done or what we've kind of thought about was, okay, can we do every other week? Or I don't recommend three data points, but some people do beginning, middle, end. But yeah, there are tons of ways to communicate these shelf life design studies and be very clear of what you're looking for and the parameters that are being in place but also be very clear of how to, what to expect when they pool your product from a certain point of time. - Yeah, it's just because, just going back to oil and natural foods and frittadas, because of the complexity of that particular project and how much we have to test. - It's a hard product, yeah. - It is. It's like, it's a refrigerator product, it's eggs. If you add acid to the eggs, you can't necessarily, like we tried adding acids, just to see what would happen, right? The eggs were curdled. The eggs would be very sour and then people would think like, why am I eating sour eggs? Like people would not eat sour eggs. So then it's like, we tried that whole route. Like, just because acid is an extender of shelf life, doesn't mean you should use ask. it all the time and everywhere. So we tried that, we were like, okay, that didn't work, really work, that made sense. We tried looking at shelf-like testing and seeing like how far we can go. And a lot of the labs would say, we want at least three samples per time we pull out so that statistic-- - Triplicate. - Yeah, triplicate. Statistically, it would work because if you just pull out one, it could be really bad. And it could be just a random bash that may be exposed to a fan or something of that nature. So they just want to get-- they want to remove any chance of random, bad sampling and things of that nature. So we had to basically say, we understand the risks behind that. We're just going to go with one option per no duplicates or anything of that nature. And we're to refine it so that naturally what we did was before we went through a third party, we tested it normally. And we wanted to challenge if our normal study was effective. So we found that it's in two weeks time we found that the product was fine and how we did that was send out to a lab, is there any microbial growth when we had it in the refrigerator for two weeks? We found there's no microbial growth. Like, okay, now when we made all those changes, let's just send it out two weeks rather than the fresh product. And see if there's any type of growth at all. And then when we had the budget, then we took a look at fresh two weeks time, four weeks time, and see if there's any microbial growth in between any of those weeks. So we could establish some sort of expiration date, if you will. - Well, let me frame this. The people who do shelf life testing are their scientists that really want a proper study. Right, they want triple kit, they want multiple data points, they want, they have the perfect parameters, they really focus on that. And sometimes as a business, you can't afford that. So it's fine to push back on the proper study because honestly, they are very expensive. - Self-obducing dollars. - Yeah, definitely. Yeah, thousand dollars, it is important at the sort of stage of your company's life cycle to do this. And it really does depend on your product type. But you can still negotiate the parameters needed. Would I recommend a single use? I don't think I would actually. I'm gonna push back on you, Brian, but man, that's your clients' choice. - Well, that's, yeah, that was the clients' choice. We kept that in mind. It's like for what had happened, it's like, well, we didn't have a budget for it, in the very early stages. Laecocena is an incubator space in a bit. - In the end. - So it's for that time period, it's like, it was very tough. It's like, we can't offer three, just because of the circumstances. But we needed some sort of data point. And the risk of, it could be a random sample that was really bad, and we just throw it out. But at that point, it goes back to those idea of, if you're ready to expand, you just need some sort of data point first. Even if it's bad data point, it helps directionally. And then once you have enough data you're able to push out further and you have a bigger budget, then we started to go into the triplicates. Like, there was literally a time, two month timeframe, that I was eating kukus every single day from different types of experiments that we did in extending the shelf life and sending it out to the lab in triplicates in some cases, just to make sure that what we are evaluating is scientifically accurate. But that took at least a year and a half because anybody who operates out of Lachosena, that takes a long time for them to actually receive funds to grow their business and then establish the appropriate budgets. And it's still an ongoing process to be honest. These are very technically challenging type of products to be able to put into the market. - Yeah, and the more complex your recipe is, the more challenging shelf life will be. I'm gonna talk about basically an integral story about a bad launch and why shelf life is really important. And I would say the bigger company is, the more important it is. We imagine this in a previous episode, but Lunchley is a great example of essentially a product gone wrong, which they failed to do a shelf. I assume we don't really know the main reason what's happening is so, Duredera Lunchley is a brand of Lunchables, but not a couple Lunchables created by Logan Paul and Mr. Beast and some other guy. And so they launched it. They did a whole marketing campaign. It's a huge, hugely invested campaign. And then probably around two weeks in, people found mold in their cheese everywhere. Influos are just talking about, take talks, we're talking about it. There was this blue, it was very apparent there was this blue mold in their cheese. And it was, essentially killed their business. They shut it down completely. Unfortunately, they were very bad at communicating the cause of this cheese. They actually were blaming other people for it. But obviously internally, most likely, it was a matter of just bad quality control, specifically in the shelf life game. You can argue that mold is because they didn't use preservatives, whatever, but there's a reason why Lunchables cheese doesn't rot. They do use preservatives. They also did a proper shelf life study. So with the luncheley, they probably did not do a shelf life study. They were probably confident from their calming factors one of you. And when people found mold, it became a viral sensation and that literally killed the business. So these things can be important. And these things can be, can be an assurance to make sure that you understand your product correctly. There were worse situations like specifically food safety crisis that can happen quite a bit, right? This was a quality issue. So that wasn't too bad. But there are some where people would be hospitalized because of bad shelf life studies, for instance. So those are harder to pinpoint, I think, because there's just so many factors that can cause not only spoilage, but also just harbourage of harmful bacteria. But like, this is why shelf life is important, especially as you go bigger. Exactly. Because the more people that get impacted, the higher the chance, there is a risk. It expands over to a multitude of different people across ages, across genders, across ethnicities. And just the genetics and environments can make a huge impact. And that small impact can still have a ripple effect, because that can spread by news, by social media, by even just like customers protesting at things of that nature. And that could be overseen or overlooked or mitigated as a risk when you're looking at appropriate shelf life testing. For the sake of oil and natural foods, they just-- they decided, you know, like, let's keep it to the two week time frame that is the safest until we can prove or validate that it could be longer. Their objective was to try to get it longer, but they wouldn't, you know. As any-- a lot of small meat and businesses, they are very, you know, risk averse in all these different parameters, because they don't have the lawyer fees or the funding. So they're just like, all right, it was slow and steady. It takes time. Yeah. Overall, it is your business in terms of how you want to do it. And there's a successful business that has a low shelf life. There are such-- you know, for example, the Rice Little company that I work with, for instance, like, they have a weak shelf life. And they sell their refrigerator. They do use a-- they compromise on a preserve that may not be-- a lot of people may not like. People in the Asian community don't seem to mind it, because they're a million dollar business. And they sell weak old-- are not even that day old rice needles that get consumed really fast. And, you know, there's still small relatively, but it is still a successful business from what I've seen. And there are many ways, as long as you have a business model that fits and you don't make people sick or detract away from your product. Yeah. At the end of the day, you choose what your product stands for. You just have to realize the risks that something like a microbial quality degradation appears in your product. Yeah. And then one last thing to kind of wrap up the whole shelf life understanding is what's the whole point about these expiration date type of situations. Part of shelf life can lead you to an expiration date, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the end-all be-all. There are best before, best by, and then other type of terms being thrown around. So basically, best before means that you want to sell the product before that particular date. That could mean that the product can spoil. You often see this on like yogurts and dairy-- a lot of refrigerator products, right? That could expire. So a best before date is typically seeing cons-- buy and consume before this particular time frame. Best by is more about sensory. So you could still consume a food-safe product, let's say like chips or cookies in things of that nature. It just may be stale or may have oxidized over time. Or like nuts can oxidize even if you map package it in things of that nature. So there's a bag of nuts. After a year, after nine months actually, from production, it can stale. And so best by, basically. basically means it's still safe to eat. It's just not necessarily the best tasting. So essentially, expiration dates don't really mean all too much. It can get confusing. It can influence you to say this is what you want to put on your expiration date for your product. But it's not the end all be all. At the end of the day, I think there's a lot of learning, this learnings and education that is necessary. And you can definitely reach out to us to figure out, should I do a best buy, best before what is shelf life? We can go into a little bit more detail about your specific product and your specific category. - Yeah, I will say just a small business hack is actually put manufacturing date on it. And then let's say we were the same. Just let you all know. - Yeah, again, sensory shelf life, like it doesn't matter. It only matters before you open the package. Before the end customer opens the package. Once it's open, then it's a wild west. Because essentially that end customer could lick their spoon and then stick it back into a spread. And then they're like, oh, they're complained because it's mold or something. It's like, well, that's not a sanitary measure. You just put, you licked your spoon after eating peanut but then stick it back into the jar. Of course, there's going to be some sort of microbial growth. - Yeah, or something. - I mean, I mean, ice cream melting is a great example of that as well. Who's liable for ice cream melting? For dumplings, was it a food-tree like ice cream? We've had issues as several foods where if a dumpling package melts, whose fault is it? Is it the manufacturers? Is it our fault? Is it the retailers fault? Is it the consumers fault? So, you know, there's a lot of different ways in the chain from beginning to, or from essentially farmed to fork, where things can happen. And, you know, that's why it's really important to understand your product. I do think that like, with shelf life and small businesses specifically, what I've done, or what I've, and what I've went through is that the people who will talk most about shelf life is the retailer and will say, like, what's the shelf life of it? And generally, you know, I will be honest with you most of it's arbitrary, or we've taken it from other people or gotten advice for other people as well. For us with frozen specifically, people love 18 months. Another kind of trick is that, or something that I've noticed that when, especially when it comes to shipping and exporting and all that, three months buffer is generally what is heard about in the industry. Specifically with exporting products, it might take three months of just being in a ship or a truck or a warehouse before it actually touches the retail store. So, generally having a three month buffer, or just understanding that your product might sit there for three months as you get scale bigger is really important. - And to that note, we will discuss more about that in the next episode with regards to selling your products, the velocities, the distribution, and things of that nature. So, shelf life is gonna tie into it, just like every single thing we've mentioned in all of our different episodes. We draw upon previous episodes because all of this is interlinked. - Yes, next episode is all gonna tie it all together for most of you here. Like, your job is to sell the product, right? And so, like at the end of the day, people wanna buy a product, but this 'cause you're under a line foundation of what we as food scientists ensure to make sure your product is not only safe, affordable, but also tasty. - Definitely. - And can sell. - Yeah, you can sell. Yeah, definitely. All right, I think this is good about shelf life and a lot of tactical knowledge, but this is something that we've, every single class I took in college talked about water, water activity, and pH pretty much, right? And how it all affects everything. So, this is kind of been built into our education and I hope you learned a lot out of it. - Definitely. Stay tuned. - Right. Stay tuned for the final episode of this podcast. I see. Yeah. So, actually I lost my train. I thought, what did you say? Just had a jump off. - I was just talking about snacks and map packaging and thinking like that. - Got it, got it. Yeah, sorry. I saw the recording email and I was like, (laughs) It happens. It happens even with goals. So, all right. So yeah, I mean,