Melt-to-Make

Sarah McLaughlin, MS, RD, is the co-founder and vice president of product development and research at Melt-to-Make, a food technology company specializing in gummy manufacturing solutions. With a background in nutrition, biochemistry and food science, she focuses on developing systems that improve consistency, quality, and scalability in edible production.

Making Better Nutrition Taste Good

Some of the biggest formulation problems I see start with good intentions: How can we improve the nutrition facts panel?

Less sugar, more fiber, a cleaner ingredient list. Those can all be worthwhile goals, but they can also send product development in the wrong direction if nobody is asking an equally important question: Will people actually enjoy eating it?

Coming from a nutrition background, I understand the instinct to improve a formulation by reducing sugar or adding functional benefits. But years spent working with food formulations have taught me that a successful product has to deliver both taste and nutrition.

Removing an Ingredient Is Only Half the Job

Sugar reduction is a good example. When brands decide to remove or significantly reduce sugar, they may immediately assume they must replace the sweetness with a heavy load of a high-intensity sweetener like stevia. In my opinion, that is not always the best first move.

Replacing one ingredient with something dramatically sweeter can create a cascade of flavor problems, including bitterness, lingering sweetness or other off-notes. Sometimes the better approach is to step back and ask whether the ingredients already in the formulation can do more of the work.

I have found the same thing when working with functional ingredients. Vitamins, botanicals, caffeine and other active ingredients can bring bitterness or change the overall flavor profile. The instinct is often to mask those characteristics, but I prefer to first look for flavors that naturally complement them.

Caffeine, for example, can be bitter. Pairing it with something like citrus may create a more balanced experience than simply trying to cover the bitterness with more sweetness or extra flavor. Sometimes the answer is not another ingredient at all. It may mean adjusting the serving size so the formulation is not carrying such a heavy active load in every bite or by reducing the amount of an additive, because more is not always better.

The goal should not always be to overpower an ingredient. Sometimes the better solution is learning how to work with it.

A Benchtop Formula Is Not a Production Formula

A formulation that behaves beautifully in a small trial does not always behave the same way in commercial production. Ingredients can vary from lot to lot, so manufacturers need to pay close attention to the product specifications.  Even small changes in specifications, such as pH, can create significant formulation issues. Rather than assuming every shipment will perform exactly like the last one, manufacturers should verify that each lot falls within the parameters needed for consistent production.  Precision also becomes more important as batch size grows. A slight measurement error, an improperly calibrated scale or an incomplete material transfer may barely register in a small test batch, but at a commercial scale, that same mistake can create significant variation and affect an entire production run.

That is why scale-up requires more than multiplying a recipe. The formulation, raw materials and production process all need to be understood well enough that adjustments can be made intentionally rather than reactively.

Cost per Pound Does Not Tell the Whole Story

Better-for-you ingredients can understandably raise concerns around margin, but ingredient cost needs context.

Natural colors are a good example. On a per-pound basis, they may cost significantly more than synthetic colors, which can look alarming on their own. But ingredients are not consumed by the pound. They are consumed in a finished serving.

In some formulations, color may be used at less than 0.1 percent of the total product. At that usage rate, a much higher ingredient cost can translate into only a fraction of a penny per serving.

That is why I encourage teams to look not only at what an ingredient costs, but at what that investment contributes to the finished product. If it supports the quality, functionality or ingredient standards the consumer is looking for, the economics should be evaluated at the serving level rather than judged by the raw-material price alone.

Taste Still Has to Win

I have seen teams get so focused on improving the nutrition facts panel that the eating experience starts becoming secondary. Consumers may want cleaner ingredients, functional benefits or improved nutrition, but they still expect food to taste good. For me, that is non-negotiable.

Ingredient quality and nutrition should strengthen the product experience, not replace it. If consumers do not enjoy eating the product, they are unlikely to come back for it. That is the real test of better-for-you innovation. Not whether a product looks impressive on paper, but whether people want to buy it again.