R&D Radio: Colleen Cottrell, Independent Consultant at C Cottrell Consulting

0:09I think it's important to not be married to what you're making on the bench in your KitchenAid. And the reason I say this is as you scale up, your product is inherently going to change. I hate to break it to you. There's absolutely no way that what you're making on the bench is going to be a one-to-one replica when you're making it at scale. and so don't be married but you also do need to have quality standards you can't be cutting corners left and right because before you know it you're going to have a product that's not even like the one you were selling in and then that's a completely different issue so when you're making the product on the bench what I like to say is think to yourself what is making your product unique and then start ranking by here are my non-negotiables that I am not going to sacrifice on whether that's flavor whether that's the label whether that's sourcing whether that's a texture Figure what those are out early on so that when you are making those stepwise scalability or stepwise scaling processes, you're making sure that you're prioritizing what needs to be the same and what can change by 5-10%.

1:14Hey everyone, this is Adam Yee, food scientist and podcast host of Startup CPG's new podcast section, R &D Radio, where we interview food scientists and product developers and what they do and how they can help you build your CPG business. Today, I'm interviewing Colleen Cottrell, independent consultant under C. Cottrell Consulting, to talk about ingredient functionality and how you should invent your ingredients. What's the difference between these two proteins that you get in a bag from a random person, we discuss what we do as food scientists to kind of figure that out. And that involves a few experiments.

1:48Colleen is a food scientist who focuses on developing and commercializing better-for-you products with more than a decade of experience across ingredient suppliers and finished CPG brands at both startups and large global companies. She brings a unique perspective on translating ingredient functionality into scalable products. Today, she works with ingredient innovators and CPG brands to bring better-for-you products to market faster. With over a decade of experience spanning ingredient companies, finished good brands like RxBar, and now independent consulting, Colleen knows her stuff. We get into a lot about ingredient functionality, for example, why the same protein can behave completely differently depending on how it's processed and what it means for founders trying to scale their products.

2:33Colleen also shares her take on the protein and fiber trends that you see everywhere and that is reshaping store shelves right now. And some practical advice on what to prioritize and what to let go of when you scale your product from your KitchenAid to your commercial line. Enjoy this episode with Colleen. You're going to learn a lot.

2:57hey everyone this is adam yi from the start of cbg's podcast under r &d radio and i'm here with colleen cuttrell an independent consultant and past colleagues from previous works let's get into it how are you colleen still in boston still in boston across the river so i'm officially a bostonian and i'm about to hit five years so in my opinion i am almost officially bostonian In most Bostonians' opinion, I am still not one of them, but that's okay. What do you mean by across the river? So I used to live in Cambridge. I was living in like Camberville area, which at the time I also considered myself a Bostonian, which is very much a faux pas in this area is what I've learned.

3:36Now that I have crossed the river and have a Boston zip code, I consider myself official Bostonian. But nobody originally from here is really latching onto that statement. So I've got to keep trying. Got it. Well, I'd love to have you introduce yourself to the audience and how you guys started in product development. Yeah, definitely. Hi, everybody. I'm Colleen Cottrell, food scientist with over a decade of experience. How did I get into product development? I feel like my story is very similar to a lot of those that ended up in product development in the sense that I had no idea food science was a thing until I got to college.

4:12I originally went in STEM major focusing on biochemistry and chemistry. And my advisor recommended that I look into a food science program to complement my interests. And I was very into ingredient functionality at that time. Didn't really think that that could lead into a career. Started researching in the food science realm. Loved it. And my first role out of college was at an ingredient company. Transitioned into a finished goods company about three years after that. and have been bouncing back and forth between ingredient companies, finished good companies, and now as a consultant, I support both.

4:46You mentioned ingredient functionality. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and people who start CPG businesses don't know what exactly that is. I'd love for you to explain that a bit. Yeah, absolutely. I would say, to your point, ingredient functionality is kind of this unknown. I can't think of the right word, but it's going to impact your product more than you realize, especially during scale-up. And once you realize that at an earlier stage, the higher likelihood for success you'll have. So every ingredient, whether it is a designed ingredient or it's a natural ingredient, like a carrot you pick up at a farmer's market, it has what we call functionality.

5:21It has strengths and it has weaknesses. For protein, for example, proteins are very functional ingredients. You can have foaming, which you see in meringues. You can have gelling, which you see in when you put an egg onto a pan. You can have emulsification, which is where you see it used in a lot of baking processes. There's a whole maraud of strengths and weaknesses that ingredients can have. And especially now that Better For You and the natural category has been exploding over the last decade, it's really imperative to take the few minutes, take the time to recognize what are our strengths and weaknesses of every ingredient we're using in a formula.

6:01Very cool. And let's dive into that a little bit more because I think that's really important for people to distinguish. Right. Like, let's say protein, because protein is, as you know, really big. But I do think some people can either overwhelm or just don't understand how we as food scientists vet and understand protein. Right. So the protein you get from a supermarket is probably a different type of protein that we can find and source. Right. 100 percent. So taking a few steps back, a lot of the proteins that we're buying at a grocery store, whether that's a fresh egg or a raw chicken breast, those have what we call shelf life.

6:38They can only be used in a small amount of time. And they're also not as equipped to be used at manufacturing scales. So when we're making 500 pound, 5 ,000 pound batches, we can't have operators cracking eggs every single time into a large hobart. That just does not make sense, as you know, Adam. And so ingredients are typically scaled so that we can use them at manufacturing levels. In order to scale them, they need to be processed certain ways. And when they're processed, that's when it gets back to ingredient functionality. Certain attributes of an ingredient are enhanced or suppressed. Protein in particular is really impacted by pressure, heat, and shear, which is mixing.

7:19Those are the three big processing or big impacts that we see on a protein. And you can even see that in a kitchen. If you, again, going back to an egg, if you crack an egg and put it into a Vitamix, you're going to see a completely different egg than if you put it on a skillet and a completely different egg than if you were to put that in a pressure cooker. So hopefully the listeners can kind of visualize that, that even though you start with that same base, putting it into all of these different applications can really change how that ingredient shows up. Yeah, let's dive into eggs a little bit more.

7:51I know I used to work at RxBar And I think they were known to use egg whites, right, in their product. And I'd love for you to explain, of course, they didn't crack eggs into a mixer, right? What kind of egg whites did you have to characterize or find out when you were working with them in terms of like, instead of them cracking eggs and like having them there? What were they looking at when they were essentially sourcing egg whites? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So there are suppliers for everything. So that's another great thing to call out in this podcast is instead of sourcing from a grocery store, large companies will be sourcing from ingredient manufacturers.

8:29So there are quite a few ingredient manufacturers that specialize in egg type products, whether that's liquid products or dried products. In order to make the egg whites or eggs in general food safe, they typically go through processes at these ingredient manufacturers to ensure that the product can hold a shelf life and that the product is safe before you put it into the finished good. What we were looking at is understanding in that process that the egg white manufacturer has at each unit operation or each stage in that process, how is that stage influencing how that finished product shows up?

9:08And what I mean by that is going back to are we getting foaming when we apply shear? Are we getting gelling when we apply heat? How is that protein interacting when we're putting in a water solution? So we took five steps back, had really great relationships with our suppliers to understand how those processed steps were impacting the egg whites that we were ultimately using. And from there, we could make decisions. When I was at the company, we were able to expand outside of bars and we expanded into nut butters, we expanded into oats, and we had quite a few innovation projects that never landed on the grocery shelves.

9:44But we're exploring different ways of how we can manufacture all of our ingredients in order to go into some of these new product categories that require heat pressure or shear in the manufacturing process. So let's say you had a liquid egg white and a powdered egg white. What generally are the difference in functionality? Do you lose something out or can it be replaced one to one? Or how do you kind of advise people about those types of scenarios? Yeah, no, that's a great call out. So if we think about it, liquid egg white has water in it, higher moisture content than a dried egg white. So from a manufacturing standpoint, first thing that comes to mind is shelf life.

10:22A dried egg white has 18 plus months of shelf life, liquid egg white, not so much. And it's typically need different storage conditions. So that's one thing that you need to keep in mind. From a functionality standpoint, the moisture content is really impactful because 10 grams of a liquid egg white is only going to be maybe 1.2 grams of protein, whereas 10 grams of a dried egg white, you're going to have probably closer to 80 or 8 grams of protein. You just have more bang for your buck for the quantity that you're putting in. So that's important. But in order to dry a product, you need to expose it to heat.

10:58And it typically goes through spray drying. So you're also exposing it to that sheer aspect. So that will influence how the protein shows up in terms of that gelling, that foaming, that emulsifying capacity that you're not seeing for the liquid. I think what is to note is that pretty much all proteins are like this, right? And when you work with a lot of ingredient companies, they're going to have such a laundry list, right, of a bunch of proteins. And they can be the same protein but have different functionalities. And they can also have codes, right? There can be codes associated with it. There can be kind of these short little names associated with them, right?

11:37Like we did a naming exercise at the company we used to work with, right? And they would just slam two. Two letters. Two letters. Four numbers. Yeah, right. Together and be like, ta-da, here's our trade name, right? And I think to that point, and one thing to call up for startup founders is that I think pea protein is a great example. There's a ton of pea protein suppliers out there. if you took every pea protein with the same nomenclature, so either pea protein concentrate, or if you're comparing hydrolysates, and you do some very basic protein assays across all of them, even though they're all 80 % protein or have the same information on the NFP, all of them are going to perform wildly different based off of how that supplier processed that ingredient.

12:22So that's also something that's really important, like I said before, to keep in mind in some of these earlier stages because a small difference that you're seeing on the bench here is going to ultimately end up very different at a commercialization. Definitely. And let's give the audience a little bit of an experiment, so to say, that we food scientists do. Let's say you had two different weird proteins of the same source. What is a simple way that entrepreneurs can do or people who are just starting their food business can do a simple assay test or a comparison between two proteins of the same source?

12:53Yeah. So one thing I like to say is food is poor. We don't have access to all of the analytical equipment that other industries may have access to. And so when I'm working with clients, I like to think of the most basic way possible to get directional information. So for foaming, one easy way is to blend a set amount in a Vitamix or in a mixer, putting it into a graduated cylinder and measuring the amount of foam that was generated at time zero, one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. And from there, you can understand that foaming stability, the foaming capacity of the protein. From a gelling standpoint, you can make a slurry of maybe like 10 % weight weight and put it into a sausage casing, heat it at a certain amount of time.

13:39It's a proven method. And then pull it out, let it cool. If you don't have access to a texture analyzer, you can even see by touching the slices, like a set thickness, You can tell the gelling capacity and the gelling strength. If you do have access to a texture analyzer, you can get those quantitative results as well and get gel hardness. Those are the two main ones because foaming and gelling tend to be the huge drivers for protein functionality. For solubility, again, setting a set weight of protein, putting it into a water solution, shaking it up, seeing if it disperses. And then from there, allowing it to sit for 30 minutes and see if it falls out of solution.

14:19that can be a directional way to do it. Sometimes we don't need, as much as scientists love to have that quantitative data, sometimes, especially when you're moving fast and you need to make quick decisions, we can use these directional athays to pare down how many ingredients we actually want to test in the finished formula and then go from there. Work smarter, not harder. It's almost like make your formula into the most basic components and then still test other functionality, right? 100%. Great. I'd love to hear a story about a product that you worked on. What was kind of like one of the favorite things?

14:54It could be from your past life as a career food scientist or as an independent consultant. No, great question. I would say favorite products I've worked on. I was a consumer of RxBar before I joined the team. So I think there's always an extra layer of passion and excitement when you're working on products that you were previously a consumer of. So jumping back to what we were talking about before about helping Rx expand into different categories, was fortunate enough to be able to help the team work on the Rx Oats launch. And we created quite a few other prototypes that sat within certain categories that were originally thought we couldn't expand into because we had to use egg whites specifically.

15:37So working with our ingredient suppliers to either design ingredients or enhance certain ingredients, keeping the ingredient label incredibly clean and being able to get into high pressure, high temperature type processing was probably one of my greatest. I shouldn't say accomplishments, but one that I'm really proud of. Yeah, I think it's always and I'm sure seeing it on the shelf was really nice, too. Right. Right. Sadly, some of these did not make it on the shelf, but the technical feats were a lifetime of satisfaction. Love it. What is one piece of advice that you think would be useful for entrepreneurs in the CPG business as they make or improve their product?

16:17I think it's important to not be married to what you're making on the bench in your KitchenAid. And the reason I say this is as you scale up, your product is inherently going to change. I hate to break it to you. There's absolutely no way that what you're making on the bench is going to be a one-to-one replica when you're making it at scale. And so my first piece of advice is don't be married, but you also do need to have quality standards. You can't be cutting corners left and right because before you know it, you're going to have a product that's not even like the one you were selling in. And then that's a completely different issue.

16:50So when you're making the product on the bench, what I like to say is think to yourself, what is making your product unique? And then start ranking by here are my non-negotiables that I am not going to sacrifice on, whether that's flavor, whether that's the label, whether that's sourcing, whether that's a texture. figure what those are out early on so that when you are making those stepwise scalability or stepwise scaling processes you're making sure that you're prioritizing what needs to be the same and what can change by five ten percent i like that advice you know a previous guest also said the same thing and i think having your advice on really figuring out those priorities about what what does your brand what does your food product mean such to you and your consumers i think that's really important.

17:36Yeah. And I think it is something that not that it gets lost, but it's the sooner you accepting, the sooner you make those priority lists, the better you'll be set up for success when you start scaling. For sure. I'd love to let's talk a little bit about trends and the trends that you're seeing right now. I think as food scientists, we get to see them before they hatch in a sense. And what do you see out there that makes you kind of think? Well, in terms of what we're all seeing, it's the protein fiber maxing. Like we're going to continue seeing that for probably the next two to three years as shelf resets continue to happen.

18:14So that's probably like the blatant answer. I think what the general trend that we're also seeing is people are starting to skew away from alternatives, whether that's using dairy alternatives, people are opting for whole milk in their formula or full milk. For meat alternatives, people are opting for just better sourced meats versus leaning into the alt section. And so we're starting to go back to where we were kind of in like 2015 to 2020 of those hyper ultra clean labels coming from the true source itself. And sourcing is really important. I think we're also starting to see food is health emerge that much further.

18:56And I know at Ipspo was, there were a handful of companies that were integrating AI, food is health, you know, claims and figuring out how we can kind of bio not get away to give the best nutrients and put our bodies in the best position. So I think we're going to continue seeing that over the next five to 10 years. Yeah. Something that kind of combines all these trends is people are trying to eat like literally the plainest thing possible. So three examples, chicken breast. So there's a company in LA called Impeccable that I've talked to the founder of Kibbutz Times, awesome team. They're just selling, you know, frozen Coke chicken breast.

19:30And you also have a fun hint of boy kibble, which is a trend on TikTok where it's just guys eating ground beef and rice. And then you also have people, there's something bubbling up about people just eating Parmesan cheese off the block. I'm not shocked by that. I feel like I did that, maybe not from the block, but I was eating it from the container, the Kraft Parmesan cheese when I was a kid. Maybe it's the Midwest in me, but that has been a trend for a while. Okay. Okay. I think other countries like Japan has chicken breast already made, but I do think some entrepreneurs are trying to capitalize on this a little bit more, make it new again.

20:05A hundred percent. And it is interesting how things come in waves. Products that may not have had as much traction, let's say like four years ago, are now taking off because consumers are switching their mindset to think about exactly every gram of food that's going into my body. What benefit is it bringing? It's less mindless snacking, I feel like. Yeah, I think because of how we look at the labels and the grocery stores, we're seeing a lot of things that just say blatantly, this is protein, this is fiber, right? And I don't know if it's going to work or not. I mean, I think the retailers want it.

20:37I think it's hard to understand if that translates to sales, but it's something that I think people have been talking about quite extensively, especially as they go into their label design. Yeah, I've been seeing and hearing the same things too, that must have X amount of protein on front of HACC, must have some sort of fiber claim on front of HACC. So I think with, again, with shelf resets, we'll continue seeing those over the next year and a half. It'll be interesting to see, to your point, if it stays and what principles from that continue. Because I don't think we'll have that on front of HACC for the next 20 years, But I do think people will be more mindful about fiber consumption and the type of proteins they're consuming.

21:17For sure. Do you have an emerging protein or fiber ingredients that you kind of want to call out that you've noticed? Or do you think is you still back to traditional stuff like dairy or eggs? No, I think that's a really good question. I don't have a unique fiber or protein off the top of my head. I will say because a lot of companies are trying to just hit the protein and fiber label, it's more about quantity and cost than innovation in that sense. So I feel like I've been seeing a lot of soy because soy has a PDCAS of one. It's really easy to hit your protein content and your percent DB there being integrated in.

22:05And I feel like we're starting to see a little bit more of the psyllium has soluble corn fiber being used as the fiber component when you're looking at some of these larger companies integrating it in. Yeah. And I think something to keep in mind is like PDCAS is very important. And a lot of people, I think, are taking advantage of wheat gluten, which doesn't have a complete PD-CAS, where it's like 0.3, right? So, yeah. And I think sometimes people add a lot of wheat gluten, try to get a protein amount, but it's not the right way to do that. Yeah, and I am curious if and when consumers will start picking up on the percent and DV differences between products with PD-CAS of 1 versus PD-CAS of 0.3, like we typically see with legumes.

22:48From what I've heard and from what I've seen, there's still a disconnect about quality of protein. So who knows, maybe that'll be something that emerges in the next few years. Yeah. For everyone here, PDCAS is what? Protein digestibility? Digestibility content. Yeah. Amino acid. Yeah. Amino acid score. Yeah. So and every single protein source has this and it's well studied. It's well documented and it's also well tested. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So the quality of protein matters. That is true. Since we've all worked in plant proteins, like we've seen a lot of that comparison of that versus animal proteins.

23:22100%. Yeah. Well, I'll wrap this up. Where can we find you if we want to learn more about your work? Oh, great question. You can find me on LinkedIn, Colleen Cottrell. That's primarily where I've been sitting. You can also email me. I'm sure my email will be attached to here as well. Colleen at CottrellConsult.com. We'll make sure that that's involved in there because there's a lot of double letters in my name. But yeah, so LinkedIn or just email me. Very happy to chat and help you all out. Cool. Thanks so much. And you're also in our product development directory, right? Yes, I am. Thank you for the plug, Adam.

23:57I have to. All right. Well, Colleen, it's good to catch up and see you soon. And thanks for being on the show. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for listening to Startup CBG's R &D Radio. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation. We've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CBG podcast. I'm proud to be part of the team that's part of the top globally ranked podcast in CBG. As you may know, we're not just a podcast, we're a community of brands and experts and you should join. You can sign up at StartupCBG.com and you'll then get invited to our online Slack community and be informed on great guests and amazing networking opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands, and more.

24:40Thank you for listening and have a great day. Thank you.