Briefing
Description of customer requirements
A customer from the event gastronomy sector requires a heat- and color-stable vanilla sauce with a light tonka bean note. The combination of tonka bean and vanilla is a popular choice in ambitious cuisine because the two flavors complement each other very well. Tonka bean is also a very recent taste experience and therefore a trendy flavor.
The sauce should also have an appetising yellow colour and visible, fine vanilla bean particles. The preparation of the sauce with whole milk (min. 3.5% fat content) should work under commercial kitchen conditions without the need for special technology or professional know-how. The customer's food is prepared and provided for Christmas markets. The employees do not always have kitchen training.
The technical requirements at a glance:
- Heat stable
- Color stable
- Visible pieces
- Clay note
- Compound development - to be boiled by the customer with milk only
Product development
The development process in detail
First, our development team compares the requirements with our recipe database. With the requirements at hand, it quickly becomes clear that what is needed here is a new development. The development team uses a standard vanilla sauce as the basis. The flavorists further develop the recipe according to the requirements.
In the first step, the product developers prepare the standard vannilla sauce and test it for heat and colour stability in a water bath at about 80° Celsius. The sauce is still not stable enough. The team can adjust this by substituting a different binding system to achieve the desired stability. The colour is right from the start. If this is not the case, the developers can use colouring ingredients to set the right shade of yellow.
In the second step, the flavorists bring the sauce in the desired direction in terms of taste. The sauce is then sampled by the customer. Together with the customer, the team then works out the flavor further, intensifying the tonka bean flavor, for example, until the customer is satisfied. It can be helpful here for our product developers to sample the flavor separately at the customer's site. Then the customer can define the desired flavor intensity himself. We then add the amount of flavoring specified by the customer to the recipe. Natural flavors (vanilla and tonka beans) are used for flavoring.
For compounds we produce batches from 25 KG. Our mixer sizes and batch quantities can also be designed for these small quantities. For our customers this means an easy market entry.
Good to know
Interpreter for flavors wanted
Correctly recording customer feedback on a sampling and translating change requests into the "right description" for our flavorists is one of the difficult tasks. Often, customers can't properly describe what they want changed. So, sometimes the contact person has to research the customer's requests like in a "question and answer game". For example, with a lemon flavor that is not yet a 100% fit:
- "Do you want the lemon peel note more intense or the lemon juice note?"
- "Do you want the flavor to bring more or less citric acid to the taste?"
- "How strong of a dosage did you use yourself? Can you please specify that in grams?"
After all, the dosage also determines the taste. For this task, we have experienced professionals on the team who act as a kind of interpreter between our customers and our flavorists.