Food lab vs. test kitchen: art or science? It is tempting to claim that either chefs or food developers are the dominating force behind a good-tasting, well-received prepared food. However, at a local meeting of the IFT, food professionals agreed that it takes both camps to make a product consumers find inviting

Prepared Foods, May, 2005 by J. Hugh McEvoy

During the opening remarks at a recent meeting of the St. Louis chapter of The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the following question was put to the audience.

"For your 50th wedding anniversary, you will be given a once-in-a-lifetime dinner honoring you and your spouse. You are asked to choose who will prepare the meal: a team of America's greatest chefs or a team of America's best food scientists?"

In a room of over 100 professional product developers and food scientists, you could have heard a pin drop. Of course, it was only a rhetorical question beginning the presentation, but it brought to mind an age-old debate. Is a food item best developed in a food science lab? Or, perhaps it is best created in a traditional culinary kitchen? What are the advantages of each, and what are the disadvantages? This month, Prepared Foods talked with some of America's most prominent food developers to ask their opinion on this hot food topic.

"The test kitchen provides the initial arena for creativity. It is from this place that the passionate chef can flex his creative muscle. From here come original, wonderful new ideas. Then, a foodservice item must go to the lab for development and scale-up. All the many technical issues must be worked out. This could never be accomplished in a true culinary kitchen. From there, a final product must go back to the kitchen, for operational validation. Of course, it must be delicious, beautiful and priced correctly. But at the end of the day, it has to work in a real kitchen situation.

"In our restaurant, The Mist Grill, we created a fabulous menu item, Cherry Bombs. These consist of ripe plum tomatoes filled with gourmet cheeses, chorizo sausage and corn. They are covered in a won ton wrapper and deep fried. They are served on a bed of corn puree with a burning herb twig inserted into them. Real fire. They really do look like a firecracker, with a fuse burning. We decided to commercialize the item and offer it to foodservice customers. Of course, many changes had to be made, and many issues had to be overcome. To be addressed, these issues required a fully equipped lab but, in the end, we succeeded. And the product even went back to our chef's kitchen to be validated in a real restaurant environment.

"Our past successes in developing great foodservice products modeled on successful new restaurant menu items prove you truly need both a chef's kitchen and a food lab. But, the chef's kitchen comes first and last."

"The ideal situation is to have a team consisting of food scientists, process engineers, nutritionists, sensory scientists, packaging scientists and research chefs, as well as fundamental scientists such as protein chemists, rheologists, microbiologists and, of course, flavor chemists. This is not to say that wonder ful retail products have not been created in a kitchen setting.

"There are advantages and disadvantages to both kitchens and labs. Simply stated, the facility should fit the type of product that is being developed. If the product is for foodservice, then a professional kitchen facility is necessary to ensure the food and package is suitable for storage, handling, preparation and serving in the foodservice environment.

"The product development team will need the capabilities of food science laboratories to ensure that quality and safety parameters are identified and measured. A pilot plant facility is critical to work out the difficulties of scale-up for production.

"The culinary kitchen does augment product development and allow 'culinarians' to test the robustness of the product in a home cooking environment.

"Sophisticated equipment such as a GC-MS, along with a pilot facility to mimic production reaction, extraction, blending and/or drying operations are necessary. Precise analytical instruments are compulsory to measure critical parameters for the flavor specification (such as refractive index, specific gravity, moisture, acidity, salt, etc.).

"Specialized skills and equipment are vital to identifying the critical points of the process for scale-up, not only for the flavor industry but to ensure the safety of any final product. The critical control points could include monitoring the process time, essential temperatures (storage as well as processing or shipping), moisture, metal detection, foreign object control and sanitation validation--all of which require the support of a laboratory and accurately calibrated equipment. This level of sophisticated new product development would be impossible and simply could not be done using a chef's kitchen alone."

"Food technologists and engineers often do not have the same culinary skills or artistic expertise as the chef. Yet, food design labs have the same objective as a test kitchen: To prepare and present a food product that delivers satisfaction to the consumer every time. To do it in a safe and wholesome way, and to do it at prices consumers are willing to pay. However, for the food scientist, it is a much more serious-minded task. The product must be finished in such a way that it can be distributed locally, across the state or nationally at volumes that would cause local restaurant kitchens to implode. There are very real problems faced by technologists that are best dealt with by a lab: