I am a food scientist, a term that may be misunderstood by a lot of people. What I do is figure out how companies can mass produce their food items based on original formulas and recipes so that those products will taste like expected later on.


by Tracy Hunter via Flickr

One might not know how hard it is to get something like this right, but all you have to do is think about making something as simple as cornbread and mixing together two boxes of ingredients at once instead of just one. You might initially believe that if you’re going to do this that all you have to do is double everything. However, you find that when you bake the cornbread, it’s not coming out quite as you thought it might. Maybe the middle doesn’t cook all that well or the outside gets burned, or maybe it doesn’t spread the way you expected it to in the pan.

In that small experiment, you realize that you have to change many things, from how long you bake to what temperature to even how much of the other ingredients you should put into your cornbread mix. Do you put more or less milk in? What about the eggs?

If things can go wrong with something that simple, imagine what it’s like when you’re looking to make thousands, if not millions, of a product at one time in a factory. The chemistry alone can be daunting. It’s not just ingredients or temperature at a certain point. It’s the type of oven or vat you’re cooking in, how you’re putting your product into its packaging, how long it should cook or cool, the order of ingredients, the power of spices… so many things. Many times the corrections are minor, but it could take weeks of testing to figure it out. Other times the corrections are major and costly; there are a lot of great products that never make it to market because it would cost too much to create them.

This is one reason why homemade products, or products made locally, cost so much more than products from large companies. Local products are made in smaller quantities to retain their quality, while larger companies might end up cutting some corners to get out what they do. Don’t take my word for it; make some rice krispie treats, then go out and buy a box of them, and taste them yourself. I believe you’ll understand where I’m coming from.