mercialization is generally the most expensive place to deal with issues. Projects with issues that have to be resolved on the fly are inevitably over budget, late and poorly designed.
Process Design. The process design describes how the equipment is
going to be used to make the product in production. A good process
uses equipment well matched to the task at hand and has accurately
recorded time, temperature, pump RPMs and line pressures, mixing
“T“The selection and management of co-packers is probably the single biggest determinant of final product quality.”
times and all of the other processing parameters needed to yield the
desired product. Sometimes equipment choice is driven by packaging,
as is the case with aseptic processing. But don’t let the tail wag the dog.
The gold standard prototype is the physical representation of your
marketing and quality requirements. These are the considerations
that should drive packaging and processing design, not the other way
around.
Choosing the Plant
Many smaller and mid-sized organic brands rely on co-packers to
do their manufacturing. The selection and management of co-packers
is probably the single biggest determinant of final product quality.
Plant selection drives available equipment and often defines the production process. Whether it will be a continuous or batch process, the
kinds of pumps or other transport devices that will be utilized between
unit operations, and the processing parameters established for your
product—all of these things will be determined by plant choice because your business is unlikely to justify the purchase of different
equipment at the plant.
Plant choice also drives batch size and production capacity.
Improperly sized equipment will not produce optimal results. Also,
you will often need to change your formula based on the size of equipment, especially when it comes to water, which can evaporate at an accelerated rate in larger-scale machines. Furthermore, if you have too
little capacity, consumers cannot get the product. Too much capacity
and the plant wastes product in start-up and shutdown, increasing the
costs of production. Alternatively, the plant may demand production
runs so long that inventory carrying costs become a burden.
Parameters are also going to change based on where your plant is
located. For example, at high altitudes water will boil faster and baking times and temperatures will need to be adjusted to account for the
lack of oxygen. If you are using multiple plants, you will likely have to
adjust accordingly for each location.
Sourcing and Adapting Ingredients for Large-Scale Production
Besides choosing the plant, you also have to find and procure a dependable supply of the right ingredients.
Getting What You Need.
Ingredient availability poses a special challenge for organic food manufacturers. Supplies are often limited
and must be contracted for in advance, sometimes by as much as a year
for specialty crops. Ingredient specifications are sometimes looser than
they are for conventional ingredients,
thus making the final product formulation more variable than it otherwise
would be. Ingredient costs can also be
more difficult to nail down.
Avoid High-Maintenance Ingredients. Another challenge is making
sure that the ingredients are functional for large-scale processing. For
instance, one small-batch formula
called for breadcrumbs, but during
manufacturing the breadcrumbs absorbed too much water and were too
challenging to source. In the commercialized formula, a more predictable, easier-to-source organic
starch was brought in to sub for the
breadcrumbs. Using dry or powdered
ingredients—now available for everything from honey to vinegar—in certain circumstances can also make
things easier and can offer better consistency, but just make sure you don’t
compromise the quality of the end
product.
Size Matters. Often ingredient
choice comes down to particle size.
Particles that are too large tend not to
mix homogeneously. Also, certain
particle sizes may not work well with
the processing machinery. For example, a company was originally using a
specialty sea salt on its chips, but during scale-up, the large sea salt particles would fall off the chips during
tumbling, the typical method used to
salt chips. The supplier could not
grind the specialty salt small enough,
so the chip company had to spend a
lot of time seeking out an alternative
small-particle sea salt that didn’t contain anti-caking agents (most of which
are not allowed in organic production). Since specialty salts have dis-
