In this episode, we take you behind the scenes of Kim Baker Foods into the process of new product development as we refine a recipe for a new innovation that we are preparing to take to market. Curious about how new products get created? Check out how we begin this creative process at its earliest stage and the learning that we gain from that experience.
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Episide Transcript:
Feed your fire, a podcast from Kim Baker Studios that dives into self-discovery and personal fulfillment through the shared experience of food.
I'm Kim Baker, founder of Kim Baker Foods, and this is Feed Your Fire. It's a bit of a mash up discussion about life topics and food. Sometimes we'll cook, other times we'll just eat, but in each episode, we'll share stories and have a conversation that pushes us further in our relationship with ourselves and other people to us, food is the connective tissue in life, and it's so much fun. Feel free to just listen or cook with us.
Today we're going behind the scenes in Kim, Baker Foods kitchen. I'm going to take you on an exploration of new product development. Together, we're going to try out a new recipe for a product that I have been working on and refining, and we're going to talk about what that looks like in the kitchen and how that process creates an opportunity to learn.
For some people, developing a product may be kind of opportunistic. They see a need in the market, and they go and seek out a way to solve that. And there's an element of that in what I do, but for whatever reason, I've always kind of had this fever for creating food products. I just find it to be very exhilarating, and it makes me feel connected to people. I was thinking maybe it began when I was like this young preschooler making mud pies with my neighbor Gary in the yard. But regardless of its origin, that passion has persisted. And so this is a fun thing to be able to share together, because I've never really included an audience in this.
One of the things about creating a food product is it's really an exercise in trial and error. You have to get comfortable with a lot of failures, and you have to learn from each one of them, because every time you experiment, you learn something new.
You also need to get comfortable with feedback. And there are two sides to this coin. One is being open to listening and really receiving that input and thinking about it without going on kind of defense, and then the other is discerning whether or not that feedback is relevant or right for you. You don't have to accept all feedback. You should hear it all, but you don't need to actually take it in.
Sometimes we can get caught up in a creative process, and we're so excited about what we've created that we can turn on blinders to what other people are saying about it, and on the other hand, we have to always maintain our vision and not detour from what we set out to achieve simply because of the feedback from others, but learning to seek out and hear feedback is essential. To that point, for many years, I had received feedback that I should create a bar, but I didn't find that inspiring. I wanted to create products that were innovative, and at the time, I didn't have a concept that I felt really honored that principle of innovation. But then, like so many things, an idea was born out of my own experiences. I felt like what I need in my life is something really convenient that I could grab and go with, that I could keep in my bag that reflected the way I actually ate. Something that wasn't nut butters and seeds, but rather kind of like a walk down the produce aisle, but I could also just keep it in my pocket. And that is how the idea of this newest product, called Salad Bar, was conceived. And so I'm going to take you into our kitchen where we prepare our latest iteration in preparation for a trade show on Wednesday where we will be unveiling salad bar. And if the name hasn't already kind of clued you in, this is a salad in a bar—truly. It starts with kale and carrots and beans and nuts, and we use that to literally create a bar that you can have at your fingertips and have effectively a meal on-the-go. Now. We've been testing this out with a number of grains. We've tried kale, arugula, cabbage, and my personal favorite is kale. So that's what we're going to be using in this batch today.
We're going to be keeping track of all measurements. So I've got a scale here, and I have my nerdy notebook that I learned to use in chemistry class where we're keeping track of everything that we're adding into this batch, and so that we can replicate it in the future. And from there, we'll do a nutritional analysis of the recipe to see where leaves us in terms of macros and micronutrients, because what we're looking for is a combination of both taste and powerful nutrition.
So the first thing I'm going to do is combine in a bowl the dehydrated kale that I've already prepared, and I'm going to add in our crunchy lentils. And for this batch, I'm going to add in some dried carrots and peas. Now I'm writing down in my notebook exactly how much of each of those things I've added, in grams, because we want precision.
Now the trick to binding all of this stuff together is that I want to keep the sugar content down. And a lot of times things like tapioca syrup, brown rice syrup, maple syrup, is often added to create a stickiness. Sometimes egg whites are used, but I want this to be a vegan product, so I've really had to experiment with how to actually make this stuff into a bar format while preserving my nutritional goals. So you could see that as much as this is a creative exercise, there's also a lot of math and science that goes along with it. We need to be mindful of the pH of the product of its water activity. I do keep pH paper and the kitchen so that I can continuously do testing and make sure that I'm aligned with food safety, and so this is a nerd’s paradise.
So right now I'm combining those dry ingredients with what I hope will be an effective way of binding them together. I've been working on this part of the recipe for quite some time, and I just haven't quite gotten it right. So we're going to see if this batch gets us to where we want to be.
Now, this batch has really great crunch. I love the flavor of the vegetables that we've put in. I feel like they've bound together pretty well. Even though I do really like this batch, I don't think it's “ the recipe” yet. I think there's still more work to be done, but this experiment has gotten us closer. I already know that this recipe is going to have less sugar, bringing us closer to our nutritional goals, and from a taste perspective, it's really in alignment with my vision.
This exercise really points to the importance of the process and not just the outcome. Sure, it would have been great if, after this experiment, we had our final recipe. That would have been fun, and it certainly would have made life easier. But launching a food product is not easy. It takes a lot of tenacity, and so this is just part of that training.
There are so many more steps ahead to taking this product to market, figuring out how to scale it, how to price it, how to build our relationships with our customers, and the hard work would just make me appreciate success that much more.
I'm excited to have shared this process with you, pulling back the curtain into Kim Baker Foods, showing you, at its earliest stage how a new product is developed, and having you participate in that process. The trade show where we're going to be sharing this new prototype with consumers, happens to be on March. March 27 which is the anniversary of my brother's passing. And so it feels particularly special to be ushering in a new creation on a day that we celebrate his spirit.
He used to make these ice cream sundaes back at my parent’s house, and they were just decadent, right. They were filled with whatever we had in the house. It might have been some cake, some ice cream, toppings. And he would take such pride in these creations. And I remember one time him showing it to me and talking about it as a Picasso. It was just this beautiful work of art. And so when I started Kim Baker foods, it actually started under the name Picasso Foods, and that is because he has inspired so much of this. So to share this product on a day where we remember him brings everything full circle, and that even though we've been missing him for too long, he's still able to be part of things in my life.
I'm really excited to share this product with the market, and I'm looking forward to their feedback. I'm inspired by the iterative process of art and continuing to evolve and learn. No matter what the feedback is, I have moved a valuable step forward, and each success is made step-by-step, one movement at a time. And with that, I say, so long.
Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.