Playbook - Custom Formulation

The Perfect Fit Customization Takes The Pain Out Of Product Development

Custom content for Summit Hill Foods by studioID 1

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s far as Nicole DeBloois is concerned, bringing a food product from concept to commercialization isn’t what it used to be.

Looking back a mere 20 years, DeBloois, a food-industry veteran and Director of R&D, Summit Hill Foods (Salt Lake City), recalls a very different product-development environment: one of larger firms, cushier budgets, ampler timelines and deeper benches of talent.

“The companies were bigger then, and there were fewer of them — not like all the smaller ones today,” DeBloois reflects. “Because companies knew they’d be making large production runs, it was important to have a full house of food scientists, safety experts, packaging and quality teams — the whole gang all under one roof.”

That’s a rarity today, she says. Forces ranging from tightened budgets and changing tastes to globalization, regulation and more have disrupted how culinary ideas end up on shelves and menus. And that’s imposed pressures on product development that many in the industry have never seen before.

Fortunately, other industry insiders do have experience in this arena. For in this era of doing more — and doing it faster — with less, experienced suppliers are parlaying their concept-to-commercialization know-how into customization services that CPG and restaurant brands can trust. Doing so not only fast-tracks R&D; it makes finished flavors better.

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Crunch Time

The product-development landscape on both the CPG and food service sides has shifted in recent decades. When she began her career in CPG development, DeBloois recalls relatively relaxed launch schedules that granted R&D teams time to create products with longevity and staying power.

“Now, schedules have significantly tightened,” she points out.

This tightening began in earnest around the turn of the millennium, so it’s only fitting that Millennials are, at least in part, to blame. “Especially with the rise of Millennials,” DeBloois says, “consumers want more options and creativity, and they want to experience more ethnic flavors. I think everyone’s looking for that hot new trend.””

The upshot is that R&D departments “constantly need to feed their pipelines,” she says. “I can’t think of a single customer I’ve talked to recently who’s said they have all the time in the world.”

Moreover, companies aiming to keep their pipelines filled need to flex their agility muscles. It behooves contemporary R&D teams to be comfortable developing concepts — and iterating them — not just in a physical lab but on distributed, “virtual” networks that connect team members and customers anywhere in the world via technology. It’s definitely an evolution from the test kitchen of old, but going virtual makes dynamic product development possible in an era when we can’t always be in the same room at once.

“I can’t think of a single customer I’ve talked to recently who’s said they have all the time in the world.”

-Nicole DeBloois

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Labor of Love Another evolution within the industry is the squeeze on labor — yet one more scarce resource in today’s R&D departments. As Jennifer Moore, Director of R&D, Summit Hill Foods (Rome, GA), shares, “Many of our customers have a huge project load and not enough personnel to execute.”

Chalk the issue up to cost-cutting disguised as operational streamlining. Many companies are pressed to keep budgets lean; so, with wages rising amid contracting labor markets, economizing on additional staff — or getting more from those already on the payroll — is wise management.

Unfortunately, however, it can hamstring creativity and production.

Consider food service, for example, where back-of-the-house turnaround at the store level challenges any line cook to master new menu items. “If you have a complicated dish,” Moore explains, “it may not get executed consistently every time. That’s less of a concern if you have one or two restaurants, but if you have 200, not being able to replicate a dish is a problem.”

Further down the creative chain, restaurant brands — especially smaller ones — often lack food technologists who can actualize a chef’s vision. “So chefs may be coming up with great ideas,” notes Rachel Zemser, certified food scientist, certified culinary scientist and founder of A La Carte Connections (Burlingame, CA), “but unless they’re trained in food science — or have years of experience working in food production — they might not have the skills to translate their concepts into something that can be manufactured at scale and distributed to 50 regional stores A.S.A.P.”

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From Recipe to Formulation Even CPG companies have suffered a thinning of their R&D ranks.

Many organizations are appointing chefs to head product-development departments because contemporary consumers expect chef-driven, culinarily-inspired concepts, even at retail. “But often,” DeBloois notes, “our customers will build a recipe in the kitchen that’s difficult to make consistently — and with a flavor that pops every time — using manufacturing-friendly ingredients that tolerate whatever process they’re put through.”

The situation is especially stark among tech-driven startups aiming to “disrupt” the packaged-foods sector. Working near Silicon Valley, Zemser encounters these scenarios often.

“Many food startup entrepreneurs don’t come from the food space,” she observes. “They often come from tech — or maybe they’re doctors, educators, billionaire entrepreneurs or a soccer mom with a unique idea for a new barbecue sauce.”

Unfamiliar with the complexities of food processing, they can hit roadblocks when transforming big ideas into branded products.

As Zemser says, “Many don’t have the human resources to do that — let alone source ingredients, scale-up, do a test run or do a shelf-life study. All of that can take six months to a year, as well as quite a bit of money.”

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The FSMA Effect

Bringing a concept to commercialization is only half the battle. Companies increasingly have to document the path they took to get there.

Thank the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) of 2016, which shifted the food-safety game from defense to offense, focusing it on preventing rather than reacting to incidents.

Practically, this has forced many companies to step up HACCP planning, adherence to GMPs, record-keeping, supply-chain oversight and more. And that’s not easy.

“Even some companies that have been around a long time are struggling to keep up with the new regulatory environment.”

“Even some companies that have been around a long time are struggling to keep up with the new regulatory environment,” DeBloois notes.

“With some of the new FSMA regulations, there’s a lot more rigor that goes into R&D work. So, an understanding of the regulatory environment and traceability has become more significant.”

-Nicole DeBloois

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Keep It Clean Additionally, the understanding of an ingredient’s origins has become increasingly critical. As Moore points out, “Consumers want to know what’s in their food.” Their desire has made clean labeling possibly the strongest force influencing product and menu development today.

According to Research and Markets, sales of clean-label ingredients are expected to hit $47.50 billion globally by 2023, representing a CAGR of 6.8% for the forecast period. This statistic doesn’t surprise Moore. “There’s suspicion around GMOs,” she says. “Consumers don’t like ingredients with ‘chemical-sounding’ names. And a lot of these clean-label trends are driven by the Millennial consumer.”

Yet knowing which “clean” ingredients perform in application requires a technical savvy that some brands — especially younger ones — may not have. What’s more, DeBloois adds, “Some of those traditional ingredients that consumers avoid make food yummier and better-functioning in many ways. An understanding of their clean-label alternatives is crucial.”

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A Little Help From the Pros Clean formulation, FDA regulations, manufacturing complexities and supply-chain navigation: that’s a lot for even established brands to master. And these come atop all the other demands of marketing, distribution and sales that any food enterprise has to manage.

So, in a competitive environment like today’s, how are CPG and restaurant brands managing it all? Increasingly, they’re doing it with a little help from the pros.

Companies offering customization have often spent enough time guiding their customers through ingredient selection, applications testing and full-scale commercialization to develop a knowledge base worth sharing.

Consequently, seeing the market need, they’ve taken on the role of R&D force multipliers — not replacing their customers’ R&D departments, but enhancing them.

“Over the years,” Zemser says, “more third-party services have risen to help all companies — large and small — figure out the R&D process, from actual product development to ingredient sourcing, applications testing, pilot runs and microbiological testing.”

Call it customization — or perhaps an idea whose time has come.

Either way, Zemser says, “Use of these third-party services produces superior results in less time using fewer resources.”

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Creative Consistency A key asset customization providers offer is the fact that they’ve been here before. “There’s a variety of products they’ve made and can customize for a chain or a CPG company,” explains Mark McQueen, national chain and food service account manager at Summit Hill Foods. “They know how to get shelf stability, optimize texture, run different batch sizes — so it’s easy for them to customize to a customer’s demands and have product out the door in a month and a half.”

And they do it all consistently and to spec. “Custom developers will turn a chef’s recipe into a manufacturable formula with a set range on all the attributes they’re looking at: pH, salt levels, Brix,” McQueen says. “So there won’t be any variation between stores or production runs. And all those specs will be documented for future reference.”

DeBloois, whose company has been customizing flavor solutions for industrial, food service and institutional customers for more than 30 years, notes that such consistency is especially valuable in restaurants feeling the labor crunch. “We can find ways to ease prep and shorten the time it takes to make a dish while also providing consistency of flavor,” she says. “And we lock-in performance in their applications.”

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Speed Scratch

Consistency doesn’t have to mean cookie-cutter. Any restaurant chain could order, say, a stock mole and trust that it’s a reliable product. But it would be the same mole that every other customer ordered from the same supplier — and where’s the fun in that?

“What we’ve done,” DeBloois says, “is commercialize our customers’ recipes while allowing operators the opportunity to finish things at the store level with special touches — fresh herbs, a splash of lime — that make the dish pop. And even if the cook in the back of the house forgets a component or overshoots, you’re still going to get 80 to 90% consistency every time.”

She calls this approach “speed scratch” and credits it with generating formulas robust yet flexible enough to accommodate creative signatures. In an age when consumers prize all things “artisan” and “craft,” that’s a feather in a food service or CPG brand’s cap. And it’s the heart of customization.

“Our customers understand that when we help them create a custom flavor solution, that’s one piece of the puzzle they don’t have to worry about,” McQueen says. “Maybe they’d love to spend months in the kitchen tinkering, but if they have two weeks to come up with concepts, they want to focus on how that meal looks and tastes as a whole. And they can present more concepts if we help them do that.”

“Even if the cook in the back of the house forgets a component or overshoots, you’re still going to get 80 to 90% consistency every time.”

-Nicole DeBloois 10

Get it Fresh Companies that benefit from customization run from startups short on institutional knowledge to food service chains with networks so distributed that unit-to-unit consistency is elusive. But brands with a focus on “fresh” are particularly good candidates.

Consider the growing crop of meal-kit companies. “In the last couple years, that segment’s really taken off,” observes Tim Monaghan, senior account executive at Summit Hill Foods. Catering to consumers who like the idea of cooking more than the act, meal kits are taking off by playing to trending notions of simplicity, transparency and seasonality. “This week alone,” Monaghan says, “I talked to two companies looking for sauces for fresh bowls.”

And those sauces underscore a critical point about meal kits: What makes each one unique isn’t so much its fresh vegetables, grains or proteins; it’s the sauces, seasonings and flavor features that consumers apply to them. And in keeping with the “fresh” theme, those flavor features had better not taste like they came out of a can.

Monaghan adds, “The sauce packs, dressings and marinades included in the kits are important parts of the meal. But they’re also often the most subject to variability.

Those packets are opportunities for customization.”

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Make Me A Match

Now that we know which companies are looking for customization opportunities, what should they look for in a customizer?

“One crucial point is a willingness to do test runs before introducing a product to market, to make sure that the formula works in production,” Zemser says. “And ideally, that test run can be used to do a shelf life study to make sure no separation occurs and ensure the formulation is sound. Maybe it’s only a couple thousand units, but even small initial test runs are very important.”

DeBloois’s top must-have is “culinary know-how — you need to understand flavors and what’s trending, and you need a deep knowledge of ethnic flavors.”

Her number-two is a robust regulatory department with solid traceability procedures, “so you know the product will meet all your paperwork and regulatory guidelines,” she says.

In fact, her company has implemented an incredibly robust vendor-, supplier- and ingredient-approval program that facilitates traceability and information sharing between the company and its customers. “It gives us a leg up with customers,” DeBloois declares. “They don’t have to worry that we have any traceability or paperwork issues. There’s a certain level of confidence that comes along with that.”

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Zemser considers FDA and USDA compliance nonnegotiable, as well. “At any point, you want to know that a third-party auditor could go in there and give their stamp of approval,” she says.

DeBloois notes that attaining USDA certification even for pilot plants is an important feather in a custom developer’s cap. Traditionally, test products that come off a pilot line can’t be released for commercial sale, she notes, but Summit Hill Foods distinguishes itself by being among the few flavordevelopment companies that’ve taken the extra step to put USDA certification in place.

“At any point, you want to know that a third-party auditor could go in there and give their stamp of approval.”

-Nicole DeBloois

Zemser emphasizes the value of third-party certifications. “You want a customizer whose plant has all the relevant certifications — BRC, SQF — to ensure that whatever they make will get into stores like Whole Foods, Lucky or Kroger,” she says. And having organic, gluten-free and non-GMO certifications in place onsite also helps. “It may cost more, but at least it’s available.”

And don’t forget speed. As DeBloois says, “A project’s got to be done quickly. You need fast turnaround times.”

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Right-Sized Monaghan describes the final must-have in a customizer, “Knowing that your partner understands your business. By that, I mean knowing who your customer is and what types of products you’re going after, as well as what kind of manufacturing you’re doing.”

He also stresses the importance of scale. “If a customizer only works with production runs of 100,000 pounds, minimum, they’re not going to be useful to smaller firms and startups,” he says. “But if they’re flexible and can run 1,000 pounds affordably, they’ll look good to smaller companies.”

Adds McQueen, “Even big companies sometimes have smaller R&D divisions that don’t have as much traction. And mid-sized companies can have trouble finding someone to do custom work without requiring huge minimums just to enter the product development space.”

That’s where companies like Summit Hill Foods fit in, partnering with brands that Moore describes as “too small to get the resources from the ‘big guys,’ but too large to do all the development in-house.”

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This is How We Do It In fact, companies like Summit Hill Foods provide many of the plusses that set an effective customization partner apart. “We have a proven record of executing on customized solutions in a rapid, precise manner,” Moore says. “And there’s an understanding that we’re in touch with the trends and in tune with the culinary pulse, bringing unique flavor and functional solutions to projects.”

How do they do it? McQueen quizzes new customers on the project at hand, determining issues like timing, the ultimate customer — “Is it Kroger or a consumer?” — and finer points like whether there’s a gold-standard recipe the customer is working toward, any ingredient or certification needs, and even if they want us to create the unique recipe.

DeBloois also probes customers about product use details. “Everything from pack size and whether it’s refrigerated or frozen to the type of equipment they’re going to process it on so that I can test the product in every possible scenario,” she says. “That way, when I send them a sample, or they come in to work with us, I have a higher degree of confidence that what we’re creating together will work. That is also another benefit of having a fully functional institutional kitchen. We can create the finished dish the same way the customer would make it in their kitchen.”

“For example,” McQueen says, “a customer might want to know what’s trending in Asian cuisines, so we’ll put together what we call a ‘white-paper exercise’ to give them several ideas that they can narrow down from.”

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On Location, and Away If DeBloois could call the shots, she says that all their customers would come to one of the company’s culinary centers to work with her team in a hands-on collaboration. Having both an east coast location in matter where the customer resides.

“We’ve had great feedback from customers who’ve come to work with us,” DeBloois says. “I may be a little biased, but I think our facility in Salt Lake City is really beautiful. Customers love seeing the whole process. We’ve long offered plant tours so they can see every aspect of development and how their products would be made, which gives everyone a level of security knowing that the plant and our team are all buttoned up.”

The culinary center offers a full suite of restaurant equipment for testing food service items, as well as a full-scale pilot plant capable of producing everything from shelf-stable soups to frozen entrées.

“We have tray machines, blast chillers, sous vide equipment, as well as a full-scale institutional kitchen” DeBloois says. “Our customers understand that not only can we provide solutions that’ll taste and perform as they should; we can reassure them that they’ll actually work in the finished application. That’s significant.”

When circumstances make a plant visit inadvisable, we thought ahead with solutions for achieving the same creative results remotely. “We’ve installed cameras throughout our Culinary Design Studio, which gives us a unique ability to do virtual product development and tasting,” says Laura Guthrie, Director of Marketing. “This lets us bring chefs and product developers ‘into the kitchen’ with us to design their flavor solutions. It’s the nextbest thing to actually being there.”

The facility’s video capabilities let customers participate in virtual tastings with the team, so all parties can exchange face-to-face feedback in real time. “Seeing those expressions on people’s faces really counts,” Guthrie says. “And given the changes to how everyone’s doing research and development these days, we wanted to make this ‘new normal’ as effective — and as normal — as possible.”

“Our objective is to reduce the development cycle from what has historically taken months, to just weeks, or even days.”

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Everyone Wins When a customer visited Summit Hill Foods last year to witness the first production runs of five new sauces, it didn’t surprise DeBloois that he wanted to take advantage of his on-location time to work on about a half a dozen other new concepts.

“Between going to production and seeing his sauces being run,” DeBloois recalls, “he was able to meet with the R&D team, see the concepts we’d come up with and do some benchtop work on the next round of sauces.

He even invited our team to his facility to help with their first production.”

The customer accepted the invitation, giving the team a chance to experience the customer’s production environment and gather even more information about how the products come to fruition — as well as how we can help make them better.

“So it was a win-win for us all, and it’s become a really great partnership,” DeBloois says.

But a customer doesn’t have to visit the production floor to score such a win. “Whether you’re here in-person or working with us virtually,” DeBloois says, “the value we give our customers is helping them think outside the box toward creative solutions. That’s one of the more surprising benefits our customers see when we work together. They may start the process thinking we can help them one way, but when we look at the challenge more holistically, we can solve problems they weren’t even aware of, and we can get to a solution that none of us expected.”

And that’s ultimately what customization is about: a constructive collaboration that lets companies’ direct resources more efficiently to achieve better R&D results.

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JMH Premium, part of the Southeastern Mills Family, is now Summit Hill Foods.

In October of 2020, JMH Premium and Southeastern Mills officially changed their name to Summit Hill Foods. “Our new name will not impact the way we work with customers. We will continue to be the friendly professionals which our customers have worked with for decades, offering customized food solutions and world-class brands like The Original Louisiana Hot Sauce, Better Than Bouillon, Southeastern Mills mixes, Shore Lunch, Better Than Gravy, and Crockery Gourmet, Chef Myron’s ready-to-use Asian sauces, and Five Star bases and seasonings,” shared Elisa Gumbel, Director of Customer Engagement and Insight.

Summit Hill Foods operates six manufacturing facilities in the United States and markets nationally distributed brands, including Better Than Bouillon, Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce, Southeastern Mills, Shore Lunch and Better Than Gravy. The company’s ingredients and mixes are available to industrial manufacturers, institutions, restaurants and foodservice, meal kit and prepared meal companies, brokers and distributors, and consumers.

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