Baking&Snack - June 2013 - 30

EXPERTS ROUNDTABLE

“We want lower sodium because we know
it’s healthier for the heart, but then the
customer wants the clean label. They’re
not necessarily mutually exclusive in
total, but this creates a challenge.
”
Theresa Cogswell

Control or at the Food and Drug
Administration is part of the challenge. We want lower sodium because
we know it’s healthier for the heart, but
then the customer wants the clean label.
They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive
in total, but this creates a challenge.
Ms. Berry: The importance of making
clean ingredient choices is definitely being communicated to consumers at the retail level. I bought
my kids heart-shaped Valentine cookies at Trader Joe’s,
and the guy at the register could not stop talking about
how wonderful they were. He kept pointing out how
the company uses natural colors and beet juice instead
of Red No. 40. Who knows where they’re making their
stuff. Probably in California, and they’re shipping product across the country. But the fact that it got down to
the guy at the register who knew about the beet juice in
the heart-shaped cookie was interesting.

Switching gears, what are the biggest
mistakes product developers make, and
what steps can they take to avoid some of
the pitfalls?
Ms. Cogswell: One of the biggest is basing decisions on
assumptions. For example, say I want you to make me
a tutti-frutti cupcake with lime icing. That’s always my
example because nobody would ever copy that product. But who is your target? What’s your price point?
Product developers must decide if they are a high-scale,
chemical-free, high-end baker or are they the “stuff
them and feed them” type of baker. Depending on the
answer, your approach to product development — as
well as determining a price point and defining your target — is completely different. You must have all the data
collected before starting a project. You can’t say, “Bill,
make me that cupcake today, and we’re going to see how
it tastes.” Otherwise, you’ve probably just wasted that
eight-hour day.
Ms. Berry: I agree with Theresa. First, you need to
step back and identify who your customer is. There are
two extremes here: customers for high-end products

/ Baking & Snack / June 2013

and a middle-average guy. Then, you need to determine
the price point, the packaging distribution and the expected shelf life. After you know what those targets are,
you formulate the product. You figure out the flavor, the
color and the ingredients. Is it clean label or is it not? If
someone wants a cupcake or cookie to last six months
and sell it from California to Mexico, it’s going to need a
whole different set of ingredients. Those are the pitfalls.
It could be that the traditional R&D person is not communicating with packaging, marketing and distribution
to understand their criteria.
Jeff Dearduff: From an operations and R&D standpoint, we’re seeing a couple of different fronts to be
aware of. One is that there are traditional ingredient
suppliers racing to be the one with the best cleanlabel package, so I think we’re going to see a lot of
competition here. As this continues to ramp up, bakers must be aware of the differences, the service levels
and things like that as all the big suppliers try to get
in that position.
On the other side, customers drive a lot of this. When
I say “customers,” I’m referring to both the consumer
buying off the grocery store shelf and the foodservice
and bigger wholesale-type customers who ask for cleanlabel food items. We’ve got to find a balance between our
customers’ demands and our companies’ philosophies to
make things better. I see an interesting dynamic coming
at us here as everybody tries to knock down the doors to
get their clean-label package to the bakery.
It’s a race. Baker A deals with Supplier B, but Supplier
B doesn’t have the solution and has to start looking at
Supplier C. It creates an interesting dynamic for the baker and for those suppliers.
Ms. Cogswell: Most bakers have a preferred supplier,
whom they utilize and depend on for technical assistance. If that company can’t produce what you need and
you have to expand your preferred list, it makes you feel
vulnerable. And the supplying company feels vulnerable when they lose that ingredient business to a different source. They wonder, “Am I at risk of losing my old
standbys — those commodities products that are used in
most all products?” It can have a snowball effect.

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Baking&Snack - June 2013

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