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Blending

Recording a blend so it survives you

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The test is simple and uncomfortable. If you were unavailable for a month, could somebody else make your best-selling blend and would a customer notice?

The test

Most small producers fail it, and the gap is never the ingredient list. It is the grind, the order, the mixing time, the particular supplier whose paprika is the one that works, and the twenty seconds of toasting that is not written anywhere.

Those details are not secret. They are simply undocumented, which is a different and more fragile situation than it feels like from the inside.

What the record has to join up

Three things that are usually kept separately and are only useful together. The formula, versioned and dated. The batch record, saying which version was made when, at what size, from which incoming lots. The lot record for each component, with supplier, their lot number and the certificates.

Joined, those answer the question that eventually matters: a customer has a jar with this code on it, what is in it and where did it come from. Separately, they answer nothing.

Retained samples are half of it

Keep a sealed sample of every batch, cold and dark, labeled with the batch code. Paper tells you what you intended. The retained sample tells you what you actually made, and it is the only thing that lets you settle a question about drift by tasting rather than arguing.

Keep them for at least as long as the product's shelf life, and longer for blends.

Where it lives

Somewhere that is not only your handwriting and not only your laptop. A shared document and a physical binder is not sophisticated and it survives the failures that actually happen: a lost phone, a dead drive, a person who is unavailable.

Write it as though somebody competent but unfamiliar will follow it, because that is the situation it exists for. If a step only makes sense to you, it is not written down yet.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for spices, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from published specification and peer-reviewed work, not from a laboratory of our own. Your supplier's certificate of analysis, your own moisture readings and your state's rules override anything general said here.