War, energy shortages, the effects of climate change and a growing population are just a few of the challenges. But companies like Alamance Foods, a food manufacturer and product development company headquartered in North Carolina, are driving innovation forward and bringing it to market at scale to help keep hungry mouths fed. An important way of delivering this at an industrial level is the way their business is structured.
Disparate teams work together and they test new products early in their development cycles. We have our subject matter experts that come in, and we pressure test this stuff early.” Creating and evaluating new food products on an accelerated schedule is critical to keeping people fed, but it’s only part of the equation. Food innovators can create the tastiest, healthiest and most sustainable product, but if they can produce only three servings at a time, it hardly matters.
Nakata noted that scalability is critical. No matter how healthy, affordable or sustainable a food is, if it doesn’t appeal to consumers’ taste buds, it won’t sell. The food scientist is going to make it food-safe, but it still has to taste good.
The operations guy needs to make sure it runs through the system, but it still needs to taste good,” Nakata said. Helping Alamance Foods deliver more delicious and innovative items at scale, the company is tapping into some cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and neuroscience. According to Nakata, AI can be useful to food companies but it can't remove humans from the equation.
Alamance has partnered with neuroscience company Thimus to learn more about how humans perceive food and how that influences their behaviors. Nakata explained that the bias of politeness can creep into taste testing, “If I make a dish and I give it to somebody and say, ‘Hey, I made this dish for you. Do you like it?’ Southern culture is going to dictate, ‘Be polite, don't tell me you don’t like it,’” he said.
This product is made of animal- and plant-free oil that requires no farmland to produce and significantly reduces the carbon footprint of this food type. Shedding light on this, Savor’s website says, “[We make] fats and oils directly from simple sources of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen … We’ve run the numbers, and our process cuts the climate footprint of fats and oils by 50% to 98%.” A whipped topping manufactured in a laboratory sounds unappealing, but that is not necessarily the case. He added that Savor-based toppings are not out yet, but they’re getting close to launching at a major coffee chain.
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