Turning a recipe into a product

The gap between a sauce people like and a product you can make repeatedly is most of the first year.

A recipe is not a formulation

A recipe tells you what to do once. A formulation specifies the product precisely enough that someone else could make it identically, and that your process authority can evaluate it.

It needs percentages by weight, a defined order of operations, defined times and temperatures, and a stated acidification method. "Simmer until it looks right" does not survive the transition.

Weights, not volumes

Cups of chopped pepper vary by how they were chopped and how they were packed. Weight does not. Converting the recipe to weights is the first step and it usually reveals that you were not making the same thing each time.

Record the acid as a percentage of the batch rather than as a quantity, because that is what carries across batch sizes and what the acidification actually depends on.

Fixing it before it is evaluated

A process authority evaluates the formulation as submitted, and a material change means paying and waiting again. So the sequence is: finish the recipe, scale it to the size you will actually produce, make it twice the same way, then submit.

Producers who submit a recipe they are still adjusting pay for the evaluation twice. This is a common way the regulated path costs more than it needs to.

What changes when it scales

Evaporation, cook time, cooling time and the resulting concentration. A sauce scaled up without adjustment is thinner, duller and sometimes at a different final acidity.

So do the scaling before the evaluation, not after. The version that gets filed should be the version you will make, at the volume you will make it, in the equipment you will use.

References