Developing a food or beverage product is deceptively hard. While whipping up a batch of barbecue sauce or cookies at home is straightforward, commercializing these products involves a lot of time, nuance, and consideration. Let’s explore the new product development process for CPG brands with insights from Jamie Valenti-Jordan, founder of Catapult Consulting.

Understanding the Professional Product Development Process

Formulation and Processing: At home, recipes are tailored to personal taste and immediate consumption. Scaling up requires considering formulation and processing to ensure consistent flavor and quality.

Packaging: Packaging preserves the user experience and ensures the product remains appealing through the supply chain and shelf life.

Stability and Consistency: A significant challenge in commercializing a product is maintaining stability and consistency in flavor over time.

Key Challenges in Scaling Up

Surface Area and Heat Flux: Scaling from a home recipe to commercial production changes the dynamics of cooking and processing, impacting flavor and texture.

Recreating the Recipe: Often, scaling up means recreating the product from scratch to suit industrial processes and equipment.

Strategic Approaches to Product Development

Start with Commercial Processes: Understanding commercial processes helps avoid pitfalls and ensures the product can be scaled efficiently.

Work with Professionals: Engaging with product developers early can save time and money, as they provide insights into scalable processes and ingredient sourcing.

The Role of Product Developers

Defining the Product Brief: A clear product brief including packaging ideas, flavor profiles, and ingredient specifications helps developers understand the founder’s vision.

Adaptability and Experience: Experienced developers bring knowledge from various product categories, helping to solve complex challenges.

Cost Considerations and Resource Management

Budgeting for Development: Bringing a product to market can be costly, often requiring significant investment before profitability.

Creative Solutions: For those with limited budgets, starting small in a commercial kitchen and gradually scaling up can be a viable strategy.

Jamie at Catapult believes that brands with product concepts should have support, even at an early stage, despite limited financial resources.  To that end, they created the Slingshot Program to provide product concept and tailored technical support at a point in a brand’s lifecycle where you have more time than money.

The primary goal of the Slingshot Program is to provide on-going access to professional expertise and advice during the critical stages of creating, developing, and building your brand.

The Slingshot Program provides

• Access to experts for ideation, recipe development, manufacturing process advising, shelf-life and quality assurance, and more.
• Delivered through biweekly meetings (every other week) for 1 hour and email communication with an expert targeted to your needs
• Rotation of experts as needs change and evolve
• Low monthly fee that can be canceled at any time