From Scratch to Market

Friday, November 6, 2015

Your friends tell you your salsa is the best they’ve ever tasted. Your mother has been serving her “world’s best” homemade jelly for years. Your grandmother’s pasta sauce is the hit of every family gathering. You think about selling your food product, but you don’t know where to begin.

Oklahoma State University’s Robert M. Kerr Food & Agricultural Products Center has food scientists who specialize in helping entrepreneurs commercialize homemade recipes.

Scaling Up Food Recipes

Erin Johnson, FAPC business and marketing client coordinator, says clients often contact the center with a recipe created in a home kitchen.

“The clients’ goal is to produce their product on a mass scale, but some clients do not know the steps to produce a product for market,” she says.

The recipe scale-up process is a component of FAPC’s Client Success Path, a five-step program for entrepreneurs to take a product to market.

“Depending on the product, scale-up can be completed in about six hours in one visit to the center,” Johnson says. “FAPC completes approximately 10 recipe scale-ups per year for a variety of different food products, the most popular being jams, jellies, sauces, salsas and condiments.”

Darren Scott, FAPC food scientist and sensory specialist, says there are three steps in scaling up product recipes, starting with a satisfactory product.

Starting Out

The first step is converting units used at home to typical industry-size units. Scott says it is easier to work with industry units when measuring large amounts of ingredients.

FAPC takes the dashes, pinches and cups and converts them to pounds, grams or gallons. The ingredients also are converted to percentages for the distribution process.

“The reason using percentages is important is because you cannot measure 98 tablespoons for a larger batch,” Johnson says. “You will eventually lose count of the number of tablespoons needed.”

Once FAPC gives the clients the percentages of ingredients within their product, the client will typically take the percentages to a contract packager, or co-packer, to scale up their recipe for distribution. FAPC recommends clients conduct research before picking a co-packer. 

“Co-packers can be selected by reviewing their cost of services, production records and experiences with similar products,” Scott says. “FAPC provides the client a list of question that can be used to interview co-packers.”

Scaling up a recipe is also about the business side of production.

“Many producers come to FAPC for assistance and do not realize their production costs,” Johnson says. “Initially, they will often purchase home-style ingredients for their product at retail cost, then switch their ingredients for a cheaper alternative to lower production costs.”

In some cases, ingredients with specific functionality may replace their home-style ingredients in scaled-up batches. An example of a cheaper alternative is to replace a thickening agent purchased at the store for a commercial batch starch.

Finding Changes

The next step in the scale-up process is observing the batch and noting any changes versus the original recipe.

“Obviously, this is done because the original recipe is the target,” Scott says. “Sometimes it is possible to predict what changes may occur in a scaled-up recipe, but often that is not the case.”

When scaling-up a recipe, the ingredients sometimes react differently on a larger scale. 

“Scaled-up batches of a product may be very different from the original formula because of differences in taste, texture, aroma or appearance,” Scott says. “Foods are a complex system of interacting physical and chemical properties. When the product is scaled up, the function of these properties changes.”

The scaled-up products often receive a higher degree of scrutiny compared with home-style products, Scott says. The scaled-up batch makes observing “flaws” easier, even though they may have already existed in the small batch. 

“It should be noted that many times the scaled-up batches are often no better or worse than the original,” Scott says. “They are just different.”

However, some ingredients are more difficult to scale up than others. An example is mixing spices with lighter-colored ingredients in large quantities. The colors may run or bleed together.

Fruits and vegetables may be difficult, as well. Scott says it is important to consider whether the fruit and vegetable commodities need to be peeled, cored or seeded when scaling-up the recipe. 

“The client will sometimes change the ingredients so the product will work well on a larger scale,” Johnson says. “It is a trial and error experience. In some cases, it might not be possible to make the scaled-up batch identical to the original small batch.”

The final step in scaling-up a recipe is adjusting the scaled-up recipe. 

“The ultimate goal is making the subsequent batches of the recipe closely match the original recipe,” Scott says. “This may involve changes in the ingredients, changes in the equipment used to make the recipe or both.”

Final Formulation

FAPC is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed in producing their product. 

In addition to product scale-up, FAPC offers a variety of resources and workshops to assist food entrepreneurs in creating a product. 

Basic Training class, for example, helps food entrepreneurs address business planning assistance and strategies, market identification and food-processing regulations.

“The food product scale-up is an exciting and challenging process that requires an organized, flexible and consistent approach for success,” Scott says. “Success is often achieved when a recipe and process for commercial production is accomplished and is ultimately measured in terms of the food product’s profitability and customer satisfaction.”