May 16, 2023

How to Increase Speed to Market for New Recipes and Food Products

As an R&D leader, you’re likely under constant pressure to evaluate recipes, make changes, and create brand new recipes to grow your product line. However, launching a new food product can be a complex and time-consuming process, requiring a significant amount of planning, research, and investment. On top of that, toggling between different software and systems throughout your company can make the process for getting a new product to market cumbersome and inefficient. Wouldn’t it just be easier if you could formulate, review and approve changes, and create recipes and labels all in one place?

Luckily, you can. In this blog, we’ll uncover the true potential of a food product formulation and labeling software that can do it all and accelerate product launches: Genesis Foods.

Step 1: Testing Ingredients and Recipes

As with any new product, the first step in your launch is to test recipes and determine ingredients. But when you are looking to stay compliant with regulations, you also must take into consideration the nutrient profile of the food products made in your test kitchen. This process often takes a lot of time as you determine what you want to include in the recipe.

Genesis Foods offers a flexible, intuitive way to add or compare ingredients in a recipe using the Genesis Nutrition Analysis database. The Genesis Foods database has collected over 90,000 ingredients from government and proprietary sources, which food manufacturers can use to create test recipes and perform quick nutritional analysis. You can also add unique ingredients from supplier’s spec sheet or from previous lab analysis.

Additionally, tools like versioning allow R&D leaders to create multiple versions of a recipe to submit for approval or compare during the formulation process. Once a recipe is approved and finalized, the system will capture the date, time, and version number, and locks the record from further changes.

With a nationally recognized, gold-standard nutrition database, the testing and formulation period can happen in minutes instead of hours.

Step 2: Nutrient Calculations and Refining Recipes

As you are testing ingredients, you may also want to test the nutrient value of your recipe. Again, the nutritional database built into Genesis Foods can simplify this process in a matter of minutes.

Once you have added your ingredient, or found it within the nutrition database, and selected it for your recipe Genesis Foods automatically updates your nutrition facts and shows the nutrient profile for your ingredient. As you build your recipe, the system will compile the ingredients and their nutrient values, which include government-compliant calculations for caloric amount, nutrient rounding rules, and other essential datapoints necessary for the recipe. That means no more managing calculations in spreadsheets or doing things by hand.

Genesis Foods also has built-in compliance checks for allergen declarations, ingredient statements, and more. As you add or change ingredients in your recipe, the collected information is displayed on a compliant Nutrition Facts label for the tested product.

Step 3: Labeling and Compliance Review

You’ve compared recipes, chosen a winner, and determined the nutrient values for the final approved recipe. The next step is to get the recipe ready for the shelves.

While a lot goes into a product’s packaging, from sizing and placement of information, to color choices, brand image, front-of-package labels, and more – you also need to create an FDA compliant Nutrition Facts label. Luckily, Genesis Foods takes that step for you, automatically creating a Nutrition Facts panel and ingredient statement that meets the FDA’s requirements for calculations, rounding rules, font sizes, allergen declarations, and essential nutrient declarations. It even knows where to place footnotes, ingredient statements, and the order of nutrients, as defined by FDA regulations.

When the FDA releases new regulations on calculations or formatting, as it often does, our regulatory and development team are quick to update Genesis Foods with the latest guidance before a compliance date arrives.

By having a Nutrition Facts panel generated for your food product, you can easily pass the accurate label from your compliance review to your graphic design team within a few minutes. Again, this turns a normally cumbersome process into a streamlined, efficient hand off from team to team. By the time your product is ready for the shelves, you’ve saved hours in testing, formulation, calculation, and labeling.

Send Your Product Development into Hyper Drive

Launching a new food product can be complex and challenging, but with the right tools and approach, you can simplify, streamline, and optimize your recipe development process. Genesis Foods was created specifically to refine the steps from formulation to labeling, giving R&D and compliance experts a quick and easy way to make their processes more efficient. With quicker recipe creation, instant nutrient analysis, and automated label creation, food companies can launch their product development team into hyperdrive.

If you’re eager to see Genesis Foods in action or want to learn more about Trustwell’s suite of compliant, food-centric solutions, contact our team today.

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