R&D Radio: Rachel Zemser, Founder of A La Carte Connections

0:09Adam Yee:I always tell entrepreneurs when they come to me, don't start working on your R &D right away. I'm like, the first thing you need to do is find a co-packer. Stop your R &D process. Stop messing around in a lab and playing and fiddling with it. Or in your kitchen or wherever you're doing it in your garage. I'm like, stop. you've just wasted two years of your time. I'm like, stop it. Go find the Co-Packer first, because if you don't know who's going to make it and how they're going to make it, you're wasting your time. Especially, I mean, there's some exceptions, but really the first thing you need to do, especially if you're making something unique or special or different, is make sure there's someone out there who can actually make this product for you.

0:54Rachel Zemser:hey everyone this is adam yee food scientist and podcast host of startup cpg's new podcast section r &d radio where you interview product developers and what they do and how they can help you build your cpg business today's guest is my friend rachel zemzer who heads a la carte connections which helps startups and brands bring food ideas to life from concept to market rachel's a certified food and culinary scientists and her services offer in-lab or remote product development for any food type anywhere. Flexible, creative, and science-driven innovation you can trust. I've known Rachel for a while and she is a wealth of knowledge.

1:31Rachel Zemser:We dive into why the all-natural trend is making product stability more challenging than ever and why she believes the industry is moving towards a cleanish label that balances health with actual shelf life. Rachel also breaks down the realities of working with co-packers, explaining why founders need to stop looking for a, quote, partner, and start acting like professional customers to get their products made. Enjoy this episode with Rachel Zemzer.

2:00Rachel Zemser:Hey everyone, this is Adam Yee from the Startup CBG Podcast. I'm here with Rachel Zemzer to chat about product development. So let's get into it. Rachel, I know who you are, but for the audience, I would love to know who you are and how you got your start in product development.

2:15Adam Yee:Yeah, great to be here, Adam. So I am what they call a gold star food scientist. I didn't become a food scientist accidentally. I didn't just fall into it or transition in from another industry. I have been a food scientist from day one. I walked into the food science department as a freshman at UMass Amherst, and I studied food science, and I started working as a product developer right out of college. I'm at my very first job at Dan and Yogurt in Fort Worth, Texas. And later on, I worked at Kagome, a tomato sauce company. And I've had a variety of jobs in R &D and food science and food safety.

2:58Adam Yee:I've streaked microbiology plates. I've done it all.

3:01Rachel Zemser:Wow. You have a very similar background to me. I'm also, I guess, a gold star food scientist, too. I hopped in. I chose a major right away. I went to Cal Poly and also been to Texas and also the streaking plates. That's why we're kind of kindred spirits in this realm of product development. But maybe this is where we differ. Rachel, do you have anything you kind of specialize in as a product developer?

3:21Adam Yee:So as a consultant, which is what I've been doing for the past 15, 17 years, and I think that this kind of applies to a lot of consultants who are independent and they're not like a Kulanex or a Mattson and have a massive building with lots of pilot equipment.

3:41Rachel Zemser:Lots of machines, yeah.

3:42Adam Yee:Yeah, lots of machines. We kind of have to specialize in things that we can do in a laboratory, in an R &D type setting. I don't have retort equipment, so I don't typically specialize in retort or canned foods. I typically do things that I can do, and I'm good at those things. I'm good at protein bars. I'm good at baked goods. I'm good at confections. I can do some pasteurization. I can do pretty much anything that can be done in a lab that doesn't require multi-million dollar equipment. Now, not to say that I can't do those things, but I would probably have to work with an outside pilot plant or maybe work directly with the co-packer.

4:24Adam Yee:So I guess my training as a food scientist, I can do pretty much anything, especially since I've been doing it for 30 plus years. But I guess I tend to specialize in the products that I can do more easily in the laboratory. Those are the things that I end up doing more often than not. Yeah.

4:41Rachel Zemser:I recall now when I first started working in industry, I think I stumbled upon your ebook or your book. And I think this is the first book I've ever seen about someone kind of teaching someone how to do product development. Now you can find them everywhere in Amazon, whatever. But yours was kind of, oh, gee, I'd love to hear about essentially this private development book.

5:01Adam Yee:Yeah, I wrote that book in 2000 and I think 11 or 12 or 13.

5:08Rachel Zemser:What's the official title of that?

5:10Adam Yee:The Food Business Toolkit for Entrepreneurs. And I wrote that book back in 2011 or 12, and I still sell it as a downloadable PDF on my website. I have to update it every couple of years because there's tons of links in there that are like FDA and USDA, and they're constantly changing their links on me. And I have lots of links to different industry locations. And so I always have to go in there and update it. But, yeah, it's just a basic guide and the rules don't really change that much. It's how to find co-packers, how to create a formula, you know, how to basically get things started, you know, how to come up with an idea, how to work with co-packers.

5:50Adam Yee:And sometimes I think, oh, you know, I should really just do a major overhaul, a major update of the information. But then I read through it and I'm like, you know what? Not much has really changed. The information, the process, the rules, everything is pretty much the same. And even how I operate with my clients is very similar. Coming up with the idea, coming up with the formula, you know, coming up with finding your co-packer, creating your prototypes, understanding the food safety rules and regulations that surround your product. The rules have not really changed that much. Maybe I could include some chapters on AI and how that's coming into play because that's changing the game a little bit.

6:28Adam Yee:But you still need real people to taste and create the food, though. We haven't come too far yet.

6:33Rachel Zemser:AI can't taste yet, right?

6:35Adam Yee:No, AI cannot tell us if it tastes good.

6:37Rachel Zemser:Well, I wanted to give that shout out to that book because I think it has really helped a lot of people. I think just to give an introduction of like the different world food scientists get into versus someone who thinks they can make a food business. Right.

6:49Adam Yee:I think so. And I've noticed that there's a lot of courses out there that are geared towards non-food scientists saying that they can a non-food scientist can just do it all on their own. But I don't know if I totally agree with that. I think that a non-food scientist can maybe get started on their own. But you have to have really good math skills and you have to really be sort of tuned into the network of ingredients suppliers and co-packers. And you have to like kind of understand like the game.

7:23Rachel Zemser:Yeah, there's a language and there's a dance, right?

7:24Adam Yee:Yeah. Yeah. There's a language, there's a dance, there's a network. There's a way to do things that some people get it. And you just have to be in that world for a while to understand like just how to get samples and how to formulate and how to balance out those formulas and how to talk to co-packers and deal with them and set up test runs. And, you know, I think that reading my book is a great guide to be a part of like that world and that community. But you still kind of need a food scientist to be a part of your team. But it's good to be informed when to jump in.

7:58Rachel Zemser:I feel like having a food scientist on your team gives you a little bit of credibility, especially when you work with like ingredient guys or co-packers, right? Having a food scientist present and having them talk in a certain, like the way they would like to be talked to, I think how it filters out those who maybe are just tire kickers versus those who are serious about their food business.

8:18Adam Yee:Exactly. I mean, I always tell my clients even before they hire me, because I do a lot of initial consulting by the hour. And I always say, you know, as you're searching for your co-packer, tell them that you have a food scientist already because they'll take you more seriously. If you just tell them you're a random entrepreneur and you're doing it by yourself, they're going to roll their eyes. They're going to think you don't know anything. Right. But if you tell them, hey, you know, I've got my food scientist or I'm working with a food scientist, they'll breathe a sigh of relief because they'll know that that you've got someone that they'll take you more seriously because they know that you're taking your R &D seriously by bringing in an expert.

8:57Adam Yee:That would be like me saying I'm trying to fix my own toilet without a plumber or I'm trying to build a house without a contractor, you know, in place. Like I would have no idea what I'm doing. Like I wouldn't even know how to like, you know, saw the wood, you know. So, yeah.

9:09Rachel Zemser:Yeah, you can do it, but it's probably good if you don't do it, right? It can be really, really messy.

9:15Adam Yee:Yeah, it's better if I don't even touch anything, yes. All right.

9:19Rachel Zemser:Well, Rachel, I know you've worked on a ton of different products through kind of your career, and I'd love to hear a story of one of the products you've worked on.

9:26Adam Yee:Yeah, so I've worked on so many different products, just hundreds and hundreds of products, and I've talked to people, and I've brought so many things to market, I brought so many things that were almost brought to market, but then the clients ran out of money or they didn't think like five steps ahead. But I guess one of my more favorite stories is something I worked on a few years ago with a guy in the Bay Area. His name was Pretty Kenny. That was like his stage name. He's a musician over in East Bay, and he came to me and he had this idea for like a cocktail mixer, like a drink mix that he had been serving to his family and his friends, and he really wanted to commercialize it.

10:10Adam Yee:You know, he came to me and he had his own concoction, but we had to, you know, food science it up a bit. We had to switch from, he was using a lot of supermarket ingredients, so we had to switch to concentrates, and we had to find him a co-packer, which we did, which was great. We found like a local co-packer down in Santa Cruz. Then we actually even worked closely with a local sort of cocktail expert, someone who works with bars in the Bay Area to help up their game in the cocktail mixing area. So they came in and yeah, we kind of hired sort of like another outside consultant because I was doing the R &D, but you know, I'm not really a mixologist.

10:50Adam Yee:So we brought in like a cocktail guy who kind of made it even better by adding in some herbal extracts. And then we went to production and he made this great cocktail mix. It had like orange and cranberry and some herbal extracts and some some caramelized flavors in there. And he even won some awards. I think he won best in show. Let me go back and check the Tasting Alliance. He was one of the finalists for the best class in 2024. It was called Island Vibe. and he's got an Instagram and he's done a few production runs and I think he's planning on doing more. Things got a little expensive because he had to put it in glass bottles.

11:32Adam Yee:So he was trying to kind of solve for that, you know, typical R &D startup problems. You know, how do we make the bottle cheaper? How do we save on costs? But yeah, it was great because he was a personality. So he kind of had like a really good story behind his product and And we got to do the whole, it was a whole pasteurized beverage. So that was fun. Bottles coming off the wine. So yeah, mostly, you know, most people do bars and baked goods and things like that. So that was a lot of fun that we got to do this musician's cocktail mixer.

12:04Rachel Zemser:Nice. So that was fun. Yeah, it's always great to get your, well, one, it's just amazing to see your product like off the factory line. It's good to see on the store shelf and it's really good to get an award for, you know, the product you made, right? It makes you, even though no one ever knows it's going to, it was you.

12:18Adam Yee:right exactly yeah the food scientist never gets any credit so we're just like behind the scenes so although i did see a post on linkedin the other day a guy i think from mondelese one of the food scientists posted something online about how one of his products had made it on the shelf and i was really excited to see someone from a large company like mondelese posting you know from the food scientist perspective. It wasn't like a marketing person. It wasn't a CEO or a branding or like, you know, Mondelēz. Like it was the food scientist saying, Hey, I worked on this and look, it made it on the shelf.

12:57Adam Yee:And we're so excited. We worked so hard. And I was really excited to see that the food scientist was posting that because food scientists rarely get the credit, you know, the behind the scenes people. And yeah. So someone had thought that that was out there. So I was like, yeah, you go, Mondelez, random person posting. Yes.

13:15Rachel Zemser:More food scientists should share the products they made. I definitely agree with that. And the only reason why I did entrepreneurship is you got to do that.

13:22Adam Yee:Yeah. Even if you just improved the crunchiness of an Oreo, you know, I want to hear about it. Yes.

13:28Rachel Zemser:Yeah. There are some crazy inventions that take a lot of years, actually, to really make. So you've worked with a ton of products. You specifically met with a lot of, like, entrepreneurs who probably have zero experience. and I'd love to just coalesce those experiences to advice. And I'd love to hear one piece of advice that you think would be useful for entrepreneurs in CPG as they make or improve their product.

13:50Adam Yee:So this is my advice and a lot of people don't really agree with this, but I always tell entrepreneurs when they come to me, I always tell them, don't start working on your R &D right away. I'm like, the first thing you need to do is find a co-packer. I'm like, stop your R &D process. Stop messing around in a lab and playing and fiddling with it. Or in your kitchen or wherever you're doing it in your garage. I'm like, stop. I'm like, you've just wasted two years of your time. I'm like, stop it. I'm like, go find a co-packer first. Because if you don't know who's going to make it and how they're going to make it, you're wasting your time.