Benchtop Product Development

We will work with YOU and your team to achieve your project goals! All of our product development projects are unique, and we pride ourselves on our client-oriented, interactive, and hands-on approach.

 

We work across product categories to:

  • Ideate & develop innovative food & beverage concepts
  • Provide technical assistance to troubleshoot formulation or production issues
  • Explore ingredient solutions (organic, sugar-free, high protein, etc.)
  • Identify processing or production improvements
  • Understand impact of food quality & food safety for shelf life

 

What is our process?

Step 1: Connect

Reach out to connect. We will also ask that you fill out our NPD Project Initiation Form  to provide us with some background information, and sign our confidentiality agreement. We’ll then set up a consultation to discuss your project ideas & objectives to find out how we can help, and if we’re a good fit. Anyone choosing to schedule a consultation is responsible to pay the service fee.

Step 2: Proposal

Our team will put together a specific scope of work proposal that outlines our plan of action to help you achieve your goals! We will include a project plan, deliverables, and our estimated cost for services provided.

Step 3: Approval

If you and your team approve our proposal and project plan, we will move forward to execute a project contract. If we need to make any changes or reevaluate the scope of work to accommodate your needs, we can do that – just let us know and we’ll work together to modify our proposal!

STEP 4: Project Kickoff & Ideation

We like to start our projects by introducing our team to yours! This meeting will give us an opportunity to discuss your project vision in more detail to make sure our goals and objectives are aligned. We will review the product categories most relevant to your concept and evaluate any competitive products currently in the market. We’ll discuss what quality attributes are important to you, nutritional requirements, and ingredients you do and don’t want in your product! We will also forecast the challenges ahead of us and strategize how we can work together to bring this product to life!

STEP 5: Set up & Sourcing

Before we can get to benchtop development, we will take a deep dive into ingredients & production process. We will work closely with you to identify ingredient suppliers that align with your company philosophy and product requirements. While we prioritize ingredient suppliers in Oregon (and the Pacific Northwest), we are well connected to many companies and will make sure that we are sourcing the right ingredients for your product. Our aim is to begin benchtop development work with industrial ingredients and avoid unnecessary reformulations later on down the line. We will also consider the equipment and production process likely to be used in manufacturing, and work to mimic this with our benchtop production so that the transition to scale up can be as seamless as possible!

STEP 6: Benchtop Formulation (and re-formulation)

This is the fun part! Our team will work in the kitchen and lab to take the ideas discussed during our ideation session from ‘page to prototype’. Our approach to product development is disciplined AND creative. We rely on our technical expertise, creative minds, culinary skills, and methodical thinking to innovate new products. We’ll work hard to present a wide range of viable prototypes for you and your team to evaluate. We’ll then use your feedback from our initial tasting to inform reformulations and keep momentum moving forward. No matter what, we will let you remain in the driver seat, telling us what works, what doesn’t, and which direction to explore further. We’ve found that we can generally hit the mark after 3 or 4 tastings.

STEP 7: Scale Up

Whatever ‘scale up’ means to you and your team, we’ll meet you there and assist with the transition from benchtop to production. After benchtop formulations are approved, we will work with your team to make sure you have all of the information needed to manufacture products. If you’re planning on working with a co-packer, we’ll help you connect, transfer knowledge, prepare product samples, and coordinate a trial run. We can also be available to travel for production runs if needed. If you’re working in your own facility, we’ll make sure that you can execute the products we’ve created in your space, but will also be equipped to work with a co-packer if & when the time comes.

STEP 8: Final Reporting

After our work is done, we’ll transfer all of our project information and key learnings to you and your team. Our reports will include product formulations, ingredient specs & supplier contact, production process flow charts, QA information, lab reports (if required), and a comprehensive review of all work completed.