Prepared Foods - October 2008 - (Page 26)

cover story Singing the Blues 3rd place: Hormel Foods for Austin Blues Pulled Chicken Frequently, developers relate stories of great ideas stemming from other great ideas. Developers at Hormel Foods note such an occurrence following the release of its Austin Blues Chicken Quarters, which launched three years ago. While giving out samples of the product at trade shows, Hormel sales representatives often pulled the meat to get the proper sample size for attendees. Consumers liked the product and asked if a pulled chicken option was available, and an idea was born. With these customers already in place, Hormel development teams went to work on a smoked, pulled chicken product that could be both versatile and healthy. The result is a pulled chicken suitable for serving in salads, sandwiches, pastas, pizzas, burritos, nachos, tacos and other items. That is not to say that the development would be simple. In fact, a cross-discipline team had to test a variety of smoking methods, temperatures, cycles and seasonings to achieve the right flavor and texture. The result uses full-muscle chicken (never sectioned or formed, the company assures) naturally smoked using hardwood, with no liquid smoke added. Furthermore, for consumers interested in healthy eating, Hormel assures that the product is a low-fat, high-protein food choice and also well-suited for situations where the back-of-house staff may have limited food-handling experience. The Austin Blues product only has to be heated, significantly reducing food safety issues. gold standard. We went in a few different directions, and it was not the only product we were working on at the time. Altogether, it was about 18 months, but it was not continuous. If you condensed it, I’d say it was maybe nine months.” As John Yingling, food technologist, Foodservice Distribution R&D, notes, it was scaled up simultaneously with its counterpart Yankee Pot Roast. “The final product truly still is a match of the original gold standard. The only real modifications were small tweaks, to allow for the commercialization of the recipe.” The Blend is Nigh One of those key challenges stemmed from the complicated ingredients, Allen explains, though this was without question a key to the product’s success. “It really is authentic, when you look at the ingredient deck. We could have obtained that same flavor without having all the different vegetables and different ingredients we have. To be honest, that would have been a much easier way to obtain it, but we actually went and developed it around the ingredients and scaled it up. That’s one thing that makes it authentic: the ingredients are actually in there, the olives or whatever it may be. There would have been other ways to achieve that. “The initial reply was, ‘No, we’re not going bring this in,’ but instead of having to add every individual ingredient that we worked on, it’s more of a blend from working with our suppliers. We tried to minimize the impact at our production location by specifying how many of the olives, peppers, whatever, [could be] combined in a blend that comes in, so that we didn’t have to do all of those things individually.” As Tyson has learned and exemplified with its new line of fully cooked pot roasts, innovation requires not only teamwork, but talented and educated teams that work well together. “[Creating a successful product] doesn’t take just a chef or a technologist or a great marketing team or a great production team,” Valdovinos believes. “We are actively training and supporting the culinology effort within Tyson. All of our technologists go through a three-cycle program taught by chefs so the dialogue and language barriers are brought down. We have a commitment to our science team and to our culinary team. Tyson scientists go through culinary courses and real-life cooking, so that once it’s time to create these products, the translation time, the market time, the development time is all really sped up. To create really ‘wow’ factor foods, we are investing in knowledge information and training to get our technology team and creative team to be both technical and food savvy.” “All of our technologists go through a three-cycle program taught by chefs so the dialogue and language barriers are brought down. We have a commitment to our science team and to our culinary team.” The process would require the gamut of Tyson’s expertise and departments, and suppliers played well more than a passing role in creating the line. “We had suppliers in (Tyson’s) plants,” Bott remembers, “and gave them the gold standard to meet. John and I spent a lot of time on the road to get to that with them. It was a lot of interaction and passion from all aspects of the development component. We had to keep our specifications in line [there were] very narrow, very specific ways they had to make it.” 26 October 2008 ● www.PreparedFoods.com http://www.PreparedFoods.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Prepared Foods - October 2008

Prepared Foods - October 2008 Contents Hitting the Shelves Winning Way—Spirit of Innovation Award Winners—Foodservice and Retail MarketWatch Novel Ingredients for Sports Nutrition Products NutraNews The Flavors of Cooking On the National Menu A Matter of Balancing Taste Solving Problems with Dairy Ingredients Colorings: Will I Be Blue? Coloring with Confidence: Inclusions R&D Applications Seminar: Answers for Dairy and Confectionery Applications R&D Applications: Naturally Vibrant Colors R&D Applications: Healthy Foods with Flavor Abstracts

Prepared Foods - October 2008

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