Syrups and concentrates
Updated
On this page5
A good answer to this category's freight and shelf life problems, and it is a genuinely different product.
The format that fixes the economics
Remove the water and you remove the weight, the volume, most of the packaging and the cold chain.
A 250 ml syrup makes several liters of drink, ships in a padded envelope, and sits on an ambient shelf.
Which turns a local chilled business into one that can sell anywhere.
Why a syrup keeps
High sugar concentration lowers water activity to the point where most organisms cannot grow, which is the same hurdle that preserves jam.
Add acidity and the combination is genuinely robust.
It is not sterile, so it still wants a hot fill or a preservative and it still has a shelf life, but it is a far more forgiving product than a ready-to-drink beverage.
What changes
Flavor concentration has to be balanced for dilution rather than for drinking, which is not the same recipe scaled up: some notes intensify disproportionately.
The dilution instruction becomes part of the product, and it has to be simple enough that people follow it.
Viscosity matters: a syrup that will not pour in a cold kitchen is a complaint.
And crystallization is the characteristic failure, at high sugar concentrations and low temperatures, which is managed with invert sugar or with a lower concentration.
Where it sells
Online, which is where a chilled product cannot go.
To bars and cafés, who dilute anyway and who buy on cost per serve.
As a companion to the bottled range, which is the usual pattern: the drink locally and the syrup nationally.