Scaling Impact: Ingredients & Shelf Life Challenges

Scaling Impact: Ingredients & Shelf life challenges

A key aspect of scaling up is that volumes also tend to increase. As a consequence sometimes certain distributors or suppliers of ingredients can’t keep up with the volume and alternatives need to be sought. In other cases the sourcing department is able to get a better quote with a different supplying source. Sometime this is regarding an ingredient that in the beginning of this process has been identified as a key critical success factor, sometimes not. Even in the latter case it can imply major effects on product quality, as sometimes even the same supplier but a different factory sending the ‘same’ quality might lead to product or process deviations: too often overlooked and often found when it’s already too late…

A strategy to start when the decision for scaling up or automation is made is to explore for each ingredient and supplier 3 alternatives to understand how to develop a mitigation strategy when a forced reformulation shuffle needs to be made due to sourcing choices (or issues).

With larger volumes sometimes also a desire for shelf life extension comes up: a few extra logistical days or even a different supply chain can set this. If this is a completely new subject and you’ve read up on it: you’ll probably simply add some preservatives thinking that you’ve solved for it. In reality you’ve added what we call the ‘insurance policy’ for mould free shelf life, but haven’t truly extended shelf life. Shelf life is more complicated than that and involves also other quality attribute losses, such as taste, texture, flavour and appearances. Depending on how much days or weeks you require to add to your shelf life a strategy can be determined for more or less clean label shelf life extension.

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