R&D Radio: Travis Zissu from Scale Food Lab

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1:13Working as a fully certified FDA facility does prevent us from doing certain things like saying, hey, here's this bottle. Go have your friends and family try it. Of course, we can give them the warning of all that. Try to make sure. We follow all the rules and regulations that we need to to still run as an FDA certified facility. But we try to make it as flexible as we can within the rules so that we can be a place to play, a place to learn, a place to test. Hey, 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.

1:53Today, I'm joined by Travis Zuzu, founder of Scale Food Labs, to talk about his manufacturing facility and how it's helping startups get into market. Travis brings over a decade of food industry experience from culinary school at the CIA to roles at G &T and Chew Innovation. And now he's focused on making product development scalable for emerging brands from day one. We'll dig into ingredient sourcing, the protein and fiber trends shaping the industry, of course, and what it really takes to go from bench to production. Scale Food Labs has an FDA-registered pilot food manufacturing facility that helps brands turn early product ideas and benchtop formulas into recipes and processes that can actually be produced at scale.

2:36Travis and his partner pressure test products on real equipment, source commercial ingredients, and package and run pilot production so founders can validate their product before moving to full-scale manufacturing. Enjoy this episode with Travis. You're going to learn a lot.

2:57Hey, everyone. This is Adam Yee from the Start of CWG Podcast news segment, R &D Radio. I'm here with Travis Zuzu to chat about his manufacturing plant and his company, Scale Food Labs. Welcome, Travis. Thank you, Adam, for having me. Great. And we've known each other in the past. I worked at a biotech company in Boston, and you're also in Boston as well. handling some of our essentially product challenges or distribution challenges and all that fun stuff. So it's good to have you on this show to talk about your kind of new venture. So, Wyn, how are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. I got back from Expo OS two weeks ago, and I don't think I've fully recovered yet, but business doesn't wait for that.

3:37So we've jumped right back into it. How are you doing coming back from the show? Well, I was only there for one day, and I wasn't actually in the expo itself because I had class. I'm a graduate student. Couldn't miss class because I paid good money to go to university. And so I feel really good, actually. Had a good time. My cup is full for going to this, like literally from North Carolina to Los Angeles or Anaheim. I was able to get a lot of things done with not only past clients, but also meet some old friends within the industry, which I found always find heartwarming. And that's actually where I met you from this Startup CPG Dinner, right?

4:15Yep, very cool. But I'd love to hear for the audience who you are and how did you get started in essentially your business or in general product development? Yeah, so as you introduced, my name is Travis Zissou. I started out my food career early on when I quit going to my classes for a traditional business degree and was cooking all for my friends full time and then decided that's not a sustainable future model for myself. So I decided to go to a culinary school. I chose the Culinary Institute of America. That's where my passions were. And they had a bachelor degree program for food science. After completing that, I was enamored with the world of food CPG and startups.

4:53I worked for Fermanage and then I Fleaver House. And then I worked for GNT, the natural color producer. I was application specialist there for about four years, working with every major system that came through, whether it was the Beyond Meat Burger that came through or Pepsi, Nestle, you know, had new beverages, whatever it was. and then I had the pleasure and the opportunity to go to move to Boston to work for Shoe Innovation. They are leading product development and innovation agency in the food and beverage world. Really, really cool stuff. Very amazing team out there. That's where I met you and we're working with you for some high-level projects.

5:28And after working at that high level for a long time, I realized that as many cool projects as we did, as many fun, amazing things, especially I know you can relate to this as well, is amazing things that we saw on the bench, it couldn't get to full production. Now, there were a lot of reasons that it couldn't, whether potentially some cost, potentially some misalignment from consumers. But oftentimes it was the fact that we were doing something so novel, so new, so amazing that the scale of machinery didn't exist for it. You had to create something or you had to really test and test and test to get it to launch.

6:00So while the big players and the big companies still work on that brink of innovation, the high-level projects, I wanted to help out all these small brands that are launching left and right here to really democratize that information that I've gained through my decade in this industry and say, how can we make your products scalable from the beginning? How can we design your products so that we can make 50 gallons, 100 gallons, even in our facility, and then get you everything you need to do to fully launch? It's very difficult to get a pot on the stove to scale up to 100 gallons, But it's much easier to go from 100 gallons to 1 ,000 gallons once you've validated that process.

6:38And so that's what we did do at Scale Food Labs. And that's what we started at Scale Food Labs is to really help brands get to that next level. We work out of an FDA-certified manufacturing facility. So everything that we do has scale in mind from the very beginning. Very cool. And let's dive into that more because I think what's unique about your consultancy is that you do have essentially a factory to play in, right? Hear more about that origin story. I know you were talking about it during our dinner about this, and I'd love to understand a little bit more about how your manufacturing facility essentially helped startup brands.

7:09Yeah. So I've got a great story. I didn't get the explicit communication from the client to say exactly who it is with the brand, so it'll have to remain a little anonymous. However, a great story of how we work with clients and exactly the type of work we want to continue to do for more and more startups is this client came to us at Expo West last year, actually, and said, I have an idea. Actually, I have four different ideas. I'm not exactly sure which way I want to go. I'm not exactly sure what's feasible. I'm not exactly even sure how much each of these cost. So the first step is we partnered with them and said, hey, these are your options.

7:43These are the costs associated. These are the difficulties you're going to have. This one requires retort. And honestly, you're going to have to spend$100 ,000, not quite exactly, but a lot of money to get this off the ground. So we had the client move into a more of a hot-filled acidified product, which was still on his list. And that allowed the options for a lot more manufacturing. We developed the product. We sourced the ingredients from the product. I do want to get into sourcing later if there is time, but how it's so important to use scalable suppliers. And we prototyped it. We did some light consumer testing with it and made a bunch of samples for that out of our facility.

8:20And then when it was time to launch, we were able to lock down about three or four weeks of full production for him in our facility, making final product in final packaging and packing it all out and shipping it to his distributor, but really shipping this massive pallet to Expo West for this year, where he launched his product this year at Expo West. And he had great feedback and great booth. And it's really a great end-to-end story of how we can help brands. Actually, to top that off, too, the day before Expo, we were in L.A. at 6 a.m. on Monday morning at a new facility where we were helping him scale up to the next level.

8:55And we do our job really well. Our clients scale up and out of our facility. And that's a business model. But we find that they like to come back. But at the same time, we are not going to hold down brands forever here. We need to let brands grow and really need to let them do what they want to do. Very, very cool. And about your facility then, could you kind of describe a little bit what it is? What can you make out of it? Or what have you made out of it? Yeah, great, great question. So it is pretty wide. We do have entry-level machinery for most form factors out there except true refrigerated products.

9:28So we do not have a cold filling line, but everything else that we can pretty much do in terms of snacks, bars, granolas, then of course the world of beverages, sauces, condiments, syrups. Even though it's not any of those categories, things like jello or puddings can fall into these categories as well. Anything that can be in kind of a liquid, pasty format. We do a lot of work with confections, hard candies, soft candies. Gummies is a massive part of what we do. A lot of work in gummies, in nutraceutical gummies as well too. and we like to say that we can develop most any type of product, even retort products.

10:02We, of course, we do have a pressure cooker that can go up to 15 PSI, which is what you need to replicate retort. However, we don't have a full retort. So we try to balance feasible equipment and then work with potential other partners to get them to the next scale after that. Very cool. And where are you guys located? We are located in Golden, Colorado, the home of Coors, about 15 minutes west of Denver. Oh, very cool. Very cool. It must be nice there. So this making a foundation that I think is a really big advantage for your firm in that people can go there, they can create products. I guess, how does that process work a little bit?

10:32I mean, you can give an example of a story or a client that has done this where they come to you and they have an idea. And then how do you go through the process of breaking it down for them so they can essentially scale the product? Yeah, it's a great, great question. So I'll use an example of one of the clients that we had recently that just scaled up and out of our facility. She came to us last year with a formula that she was selling at farmer's markets that she was making at home, selling on the stove. She just got some word from some big investors that they're interested in potentially helping her scale, potentially helping her create her own small facility.

11:05But she was still at this point where she was going to Whole Foods and buying little glass jars of spices off the shelf. And so for that project, in general, we try to see how far back do we need to peel the layers to get to the core idea, to get to the really, this is your value proposition. Once we understand the true value proposition and the guardrails, then we'll redesign from the ground up with scalable ingredients. It is very important that we always use scalable ingredients to develop products. This is something that we take a lot of pride and energy to do. It often means that it takes about 30 days, even 45 days to sometimes hit the bench, depending on how quickly suppliers can get back information or product samples to us.

11:47Once we have this MVP for scalable suppliers, these are suppliers that can provide 50 pound bag or a five gallon bucket all the way up to multiple pallets. And you don't have to worry about will they not be able to provide those. We do have some great relationships with a lot of suppliers who can provide smaller batches so we can run these pallets. After we have this prototype with scalable products, we often like to enter consumer testing. Not all times we do this. Sometimes larger brands or larger clients will want to move in this direction to kind of validate right off the bat if we're moving in the right direction or not.

12:20But if we don't do consumer testing, we're going to go straight into iteration refinement. Iteration refinement with the client is something that we like to spend a little extra time on. and we will send samples back and forth pretty consistently every two weeks or so to clients to hone in on exactly what they're looking for and talk about it live over calls. We don't just say you get three iterations and then we're done. It's really this iterative process that we work hand in hand with the client. We really partner with the client. It's not a, it's just a contract relationship. Once we have something that everybody likes and everyone feels is 90 % there, we're never can I get 100?

12:57Sometimes we do. But if we get 90 % there, we want to push to pilot as quick as possible. And so we can pilot in anything from a one-gallon confectionery cooker. Of course, working with candy, you can use smaller amounts. So sorry to interrupt. What do you think is quick in this situation? Very good question. I know what's quick, but maybe the people. Yeah. If you're listening, don't. Once we have ingredients in-house to work with, if we can get to pilot within 30 days, that's our goal. Very cool. That's really our goal. So for this one client, we were able to get her to pilot within a month, actually, yet within 30 days.

13:31We try to aim for over 20 gallons in pilot. We can run 20, 30, up to 100 gallons as a pilot run. And I told you this before, but I'll say it loud and proud. We don't just solve problems. We oftentimes discover what problems are to solve in the first place. Oftentimes you'll see runs fail when they hit their first run at a manufacturer, and there's$50 ,000 down the drain right then and there. We really try to avoid that up front. And so after we run this pilot, we understand where everything fails. We have a very specific pilot process where we don't just run it as quick as we can or as efficiently as we can.

14:06We stress test it. We turn the temperature up. We don't stir it. We pour off multiple times throughout the process. We evaluate that color change, the flavor change, the viscosity change. Is there anything breaking in the product? Is there anything getting caught anywhere in the product, in the pumps and whatnot? And we provide a whole report at the end of that. So when we did this for this one client that I was referring to earlier, actually even create prototypes of devices that would go. This one needed a specific, less of a device, more of a tool, a specific grate that went into the kettle to keep a product submerged through the cooking process.

14:40And so we got our custom machine parts for this product as well that she was able to then use. ultimately for this client, we ended up creating a process and a formula and even had some custom flavors made for her to get her to the point where she just opened up a$12 million facility this year. Wow. That's really cool. So basically these pilots allow them to validate that one, this product works, but two, do you suggest to clients what to do with kind of their pilot samples or have you found any creative ideas of how your clients have used their pilot samples? Yeah. So the beauty of making pilot samples in an FDA-certified facility is that they are a usable, sellable product.

15:16Now, we run all of our pilots as if they were a full production run, full run books, even if we do not have a process letter at that point. And then for those listening, process letters are needed in the production to ensure that a body that the FDA has deemed appropriate can say, this is the time and temperature needed to make this product safe. So even if we don't have that going to the pilot, we'll quarantine the product until we can get that. We work with some great process authorities, including some organizations, some schools. The Cornell Food Lab is a great one as well to work with. And once we get that back, then we can release the product as long as we've met those time and temperatures.

15:51To answer your question directly, they're sellable, usable products. Oftentimes they go out for friends and family, but they can be sold. They can go to farmers markets locally and sell to get initial feedback. But also, a lot of these products can enter a whole new round of stability testing. And we really like to enter stability testing too after pilot runs. That's very true. So I've dealt with this a lot where when I got pilot samples, we had a lot of them. We didn't know what to do with them. So we've done everything from market research to stability testing, as you said. And it's good that you mentioned essentially in some products you require a process authority.

16:25It's also good that you mentioned that you quarantined them until that's approved as well. Yeah. Working as a fully certified FDA facility does prevent us from doing certain things like saying, hey, here's this bottle. Go have your friends and family try it. Of course, we can give them the warning of all that. Try to make sure we follow all the rules and regulations that we need to to still run as an FDA certified facility. But we try to make it as flexible as we can within the rules so that we can be a place to play, a place to learn, a place to test. Very cool. We'll be right back. All right, people, listen up.

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17:56So you have dealt with a lot of entrepreneurs and obviously, and also some really cool products through your career. And I think I know where this question is going to go to, but I'd love to hear a piece of advice that you have commonly said to a lot of entrepreneurs in CPG as they make or improve their product. What is this advice that you keep on repeating to people often? That's actually funny. I may not know exactly what you're thinking of, but I want to hear what you're thinking of. I was thinking sourcing. Yes, yes, yes. So sourcing is a major part of it. I'll talk about two things. One, it is so incredibly important to make sure you're sourcing from the right places.

18:30Countless times I've seen products fail at scale because a larger manufacturer says, oh, I have a supplier for that. Oh, you just use one from bulkingredients.com. I have a better version of that. And then they use it and it doesn't work at scale. And then that's when you have$2 ,000 plus losses. So yes, making sure that you have ingredient suppliers who you can trust and lean on and honestly use them as experts oftentimes in the development process is huge. Along with the ingredients and the suppliers, I will actually say one more thing, Adam, and it is that people launching new brands, I want to be able to give them the advice to say, you will not be able to make exactly what you make at home that tasted amazing to you and it's in your head and launch that exact product with every single spec that you originally made at home.

19:14It could happen in some other world or it could happen if you get lucky, honestly. But in reality, that's why we shoot for 90 % acceptance, because as you scale, you just find and learn new things. There's oftentimes that with the extra heat and amount of product, it's a better product than what was recently made. But there has to be some level of it's good enough to launch. Yeah. What's the word? Done is better than perfect in a sense. You also bring a really good point. Right. Yeah, I think this is what I instilled to a lot of the people I talk to is that things will change as you scale up your product, right?

19:47That's different tools, different machinery, different processes, and, you know, just gravity and the way physics work, it will change your product inherently. So it's something that I instilled pretty early on because I think that's very important. Some people just do not get out of that bubble. And some people just get stuck there because they're so in their head about the quality of a product, right? But things do change as you scale it. I want to call out Grunz or Grunz, I'm exactly sure. The Gummy Bear Supplements, they reformulated four or five times in their first year, just in their first year, because of taste issues, because of sticking in the bag issues, because of the color issues.

20:26And ultimately, they're a massively successful company right now. Yes, it costs time to do this. No, I'm not saying everyone should reformulate five times in their first year. But that just means that launching is one of the hardest parts. Getting to that launch is one of the most difficult things you can do. And if you have something that's good enough, launch. Hear from people. Get that feedback. Understand what happens. Understand what breaks. And then fix it after you've launched. For sure, yeah. Yeah, get enough data that really validates that problem, right? I'd love to hear a little bit more about sourcing.

20:55Let's try to get tangible here. What's kind of a common ingredient you've noticed that has been difficult to kind of say from one supplier to another supplier? I think you mentioned during this example, like, okay, we had something from bulk supplements, and then we got one from our person, and then it didn't work. Well, what are some examples of ingredients that kind of follow that? Well, people can avoid sites like bulk supplements that, honestly, I've reached out to and asked for COAs, and they said, oh, well, the product changes a little bit. So I can send you a new COA every time I get it.

21:21That's not what we want. However, to answer your question directly, and as we move into a world where we are using cleaner-labeled ingredients, anything that is fruit or vegetable-based, whether that's purees, juices, concentrates, by no means are two juices or two purees made by two suppliers of equal quality. They're almost always different, and they can be very different in quality. You could taste a blueberry puree from one supplier, and it could be tart and acidic and grainy. and then you could taste one from another supplier, you're like, wow, this is like almost a sorbet. It freezes and it's the finished product.

21:53But both are claiming to be blueberry puree at a set amount of bricks, standardized to a certain level, but they're not all made equal. So that is a big part about ensuring that whenever we source those raw ingredients, we source from multiple suppliers and just test right off the bat. Even just flavors we source from multiple suppliers. It's a smart thing to do, but you'd be surprised at what that third or fourth supplier could provide versus what that first one could. And if you're relying on that clean label natural ingredient to be the flavor profile or the color or boost the main profile, you want that to be really, really good from the start.

22:30Good in, good out. Crap in, crap out. For sure. Yeah, I think you mentioned about like, okay, one blueberry can taste different from another blueberry. I mean, where it came from, the season it came from, there's just so many different things, how it's stored. And I think one example we like to give in the food industry, and you worked at Furmanage, a flavor company, these guys, all these flavor houses have like hundreds of different vanillas. And if you're not specific on what vanilla you want, you can get something generic or just essentially unsatisfying. Yeah. I guess in terms of like specificity and how you talk about it with your clientele, do you have any tips on that?