When you see frozen food at the supermarket, you may not think about it and many people don’t even know it but they’re actually a result of food science. Just like any other item that needs to be manufactured for consumables, a lot of food will always start with a concept, whether the concept comes from the consumer or from a marketing aspect. That’s what food science is all about. Brandon Shepherd, CEO and Founder of Mile High Food Science, talks about paints a picture of what the food science space involves and what goes on behind food product development and manufacturing.

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Food Science: From Concept To Shelf with Brandon Shepherd

We’re up in Denver and we’re visiting with Brandon Shepherd. He’s the CEO and founder of Mile High Food Science. Brandon, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

We are a food product development consulting company that works with a lot of major consumer package goods companies here in America as well as in Central America.

When folks would go food design, what does that mean? Paint us a picture, we’ve got this picture that you probably can’t see that well in the video in the background, but it’s the thing called Side Shots. Let’s talk a bit about that and maybe that will paint the picture for them.

A lot of food will always start with a concept, just like any other item that needs to be manufactured for consumables. Whether a concept comes from the consumer or from a marketing aspect, that’s where the idea starts. Once the data is gathered, it will be handed over to a product developer or a food scientist to say please make this product that can be manufactured in our facility at these certain costs.

We see that typically in the frozen food counters and the supermarket regularly. As you look at it, we were talking about Side Shots. For the listener they talk about food science and that’s certainly not how I grew up. There were family recipes that we’d worked with. What I see from what you were talking about, why I was excited about having you on the show is you did Hot Pockets where you did product development for Hot Pockets and then you’ve actually had a foray into the cannabis industry as well.

When I graduated college, there was no such degree as a food science degree. This industry and this position has grown immensely over the past decade, two decades. Food science has become a household name now almost. Everybody knows a food scientist somewhere. Those are the rings that I travel in. The need for this kind of product development and knowledge of the science and manufacturing of food is becoming a very important and necessary in this environment. Food is the number one manufacturing business in North America. There are more food manufacturers than anything else. The industry seems very innocuous and we all have to eat, but it is a behemoth of an industry.

You graduated college and you worked at a dairy place. You worked at a manufacturing facility of some kind. Then at some point you got hooked up with Hot Pockets?

Yes. I actually just fell into the food industry. I was working. I had just come back from a teaching job in Japan for a year and 911 had happened while I was there. When I came back there were zero jobs to be held. I was a camp counselor. I did work with my dad when he could afford it. Then I was a microscopist for a long time and I just happened to fall into a temp job at Nestle handheld food groups, which was located in the Denver Tech Center at the time. Worked there for a week, sling and Hot Pockets on the bench top. Making them by hands actually. They gave me a job offer the next week and the rest is history.

Your degree is microbiology. That’s a torturous path from microbiology to food.

I fell into it and I got pretty lucky that my career path took me to food.

You went from basically assembling Hot Pockets, you got a job offer. What were the types of things that you were doing for Nestle that led you to where you are today?

The first position that I was offered was a filling technologist. If you know a Hot Pocket, it’s made of two pieces, the dough and the filling. Most of our processes were either product optimization, to make them run better through the factory or was cost reduction was a lot of what we did. That was a lot of the maintenance. I was fortunate enough that Nestle sent me to the American Institute of Baking, where I became a certified baker out of Manhattan, Kansas. One of the best baking schools in the world, especially for manufacturing of baked goods. Then they gave me a promotion to bakery technologist. That’s where I got to work on the crust instead of the filling. It was at that time where we had the concept of the Side Shots and was able to launch that product in nine months from concept to on shelf.

For the folks that aren’t aware of the Side Shots, it’s basically a bun wrapped around like a hamburger filling.

It was a slider. Sliders were huge at the time and everybody wanted to get into the slider market. It was a no brainer for a Hot Pockets to go in to the same concept. It was just the form and function was very difficult to achieve through large scale manufacturing. This was the compromise in our attempt to penetrate that market at the time.

That was something that you took from concept to market in nine-month timeframe.

Scale up and everything through the factory, which is a pretty short time for this type of product at that scale.

Typically, folks have a comparison, like the Hot Pockets or the breakfast, toaster, jelly filled, whatever. What’s the typical timeframe to take from concept to nationwide distribution?

A good timeframe is anywhere from a year and a half to three years.

Food Science: Frozen food has a much longer shelf life than other products.

The shelf life is typically how long?

That’s the interesting part about food, especially frozen food. Frozen food has a much longer shelf life than other products. The shelf life of a Hot Pocket is around eighteen months. The best buy date has really little to do with the consumer. It has more to do with the product, getting through the distribution from manufacturing to on shelf. It can take up to six months, eight months for even a product to get through the distribution before it’s on shelf. The retailer acquires that shelf life in order to get the quality of product in your hands in time.

You’re talking about this one was on the shelf and in demand for about five years.

When I worked at Nestle, they published a book and gave it out to everybody and one of the interesting things I pulled from it was a line extension, which is what this is. A line extension is simply taking the base product and adding a new flavor to it or something. The original Hot Pocket was pepperoni and ham and cheese. Everything else is a line extension. The typical success rate of a line extension in this kind of a company is 2%. For a product like this to sit on the shelf for five years after production, to me is a success.

I get fascinated about what you do, as a typical consumer, you go past the shelf of all the frozen this and frozen that and you’ll see something that’s unusual, like the rage now I think is the Little Cup. You’re dropping out again and you microwave and you have your own omelet in a deal. You go, how many of us made omelets, but they make it convenient and microwaveable, and so that’s out there. Then poppers, the Jalapeno Poppers for a while was a big deal with various cheeses and so on and so forth.

Tortino’s pizza, the little tiny pizza bites. That was the number one competitor.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe there are a lot of folks that are really familiar with this arena, but I was not sure. For those that are outside of Colorado, don’t know that the cannabis industry is fairly robust here. You were talking about, you did a cannabis brownie at one point and you broadcast it and all that stuff.

Here in Colorado, we are fortunate enough to have a new market, a billion-dollar market up open up overnight. One of the components of this market is food. It was an opportunity that we thought we should go after. We have created several products that are used in the cannabis industry as well. We worked with a lot of clients here that have existing products where we help them extend their shelf life or get better, more consistent dosing in their products. Just to make the product quality better.

The chewing gum is one that just stuck in my mind. It’s something I wouldn’t have thought of personally. If you could walk us through the thought process, timeframe, design and then execution.

Fortunate enough for us since we’re a very small, tight knit company. We can move much faster than the nine-month timeline that we have here. We feel we have a concept for a chewing gum with cannabis in it. We actually have some products that had been made and distributed here in Colorado. We fell into that concept in another one of these and we just happen stance to fall into it. The first production machine we made was in my garage to test the concept, prove the concepts. That worked, so we went full steam in this and actually was able to develop a very well received product that is unique. There’s not another one out there as far as I know in this market.

When you develop a unique food product, whether it’s that one or that one, can you license patent to protect your design?

In this instance, we are licensing this formula and the process to third parties who wants to manufacture and distribute it under either our name or a private label name. In the food industry, I tell people never patents anything in the food industry, especially a formula or a recipe or a process. Because someone like me will come right up behind them and say, I can change this and this and get this same exact outcome. What we’ve done actually in our gum base is we’ve separated into three bags, so that you have bag A, bag B and bag C, which now we can hold our IP closer to us but make it available to these licensees in a very usable form.

I’m like, “What in the world were you thinking about when you decided, I’m going to make some cannabis chewing gum.” How did that thought come to you?

We are constantly looking at new products, new trends, what’s out in the market, constantly reading my LinkedIn feeds to see what’s new, what’s out there. Then the other side of it is, just the experience of working in a company like Nestle or like Dean foods, that have the resources to pull a consumer data, that have the resources to pull in a consumer testing, that kind of stuff. Where you learn to say this is the smartest decision to go after. Whether it’s low barrier to entry, ease of manufacturing, uniqueness of item. The cannabis industry is saturated with gummies. Every single company and their brother makes a gummy and they’re huge. They’re probably the number one consumed edible right now.

From my experience in the CPG industry, it is not easy for a new person to penetrate a market that is also overly saturated, but everybody is. Our goal is to say, “What are those products that aren’t out there, so we don’t have to compete with a lot of people and that are easy to make and can be low cost? I want every single consumer to leave that retail store with one of my products. If it takes being the lowest price, which is, right now, is a good incentive. That’s one of our strategies.

I think about the past training that brings you to here for the major food production folks and so on. For the listener out there that’s like, “I’ve had this idea for this food product,” whether it’s family recipe or whatever, what’s the process for them to reach out to you and how do you make a decision? How do you help them make a decision whether there’s something to go forward with or not?

We get a lot of our leads through the LinkedIn or through a MileHighFoodScience.com. We have an entry form there as well as the industry connections that I have. A lot of it is referral. We do very little outgoing marketing or sales. What would typically happen is we get a request from a customer and let’s assume it’s a startup. I have this great idea. My grandma had this recipe forever and everybody loves it. I want to can it. I want to put it in a jar and sell it. That’s how valuable it is. The process that will come to us, basically there’s an evaluation. They have to fill out a lot of information and relay what they want. For example, serving size, ingredients, what ingredients can’t you use, what certifications do you want? We need to know pretty much the idea of what they’re imagining it looks like on the shelf, before we even start designing anything.

The main goal of the very first encounter is to say, “Yes, this is doable,” or “No, this is not doable.”

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The main goal of the very first encounter is to say yes, this is doable or no, this is not doable. That’s where we start. Is there a point where we will advise that it’s probably not a good path to go down? There have been those instances, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop there. We will also say, here’s an alternative that we think that might be successful. Would you like to explore this avenue as well? We will give alternatives to products that we have very good insight to know that’s going to be a hard market to get into. Some of it could be regulatory. Some of it could be the laws that are in place. It’s going to take you money to overcome those barriers. Do you have that money? That’s the discussion we have. This is what it’s going to cost to go past. Once we’re done with you, here’s what it’s going to cost to go past that.

For the sake of argument, I came up with a salsa family recipe and we go through it. You go, here’s what it’s going to be and do and packaging and so on. Is there an outsource firm that will take and then make it for you or do you then have to do it yourself?

There are many co-manufacturers here in town and all over the country. Big and small that you basically take your recipe to and you say, here, can you please package this for me and here’s what I want label to look like, and they will do it for you. They have to make sure it’s safe. There will be some testing and there may be some changes that have to take place at that because they have to produce a safe product that comes out of that manufacturing facility but no, absolutely. Luckily enough here in Colorado, we have a thing called the Colorado Cottage Act to where there are certain criteria of food that you can make in your house and sell at a farmer’s market to get you started. They run under the Department of Agriculture and they want to promote people getting into the food industry.

I’ve seen in the market in Minturn, there will be somebody with jams and somebody else with noodles and all that stuff.

In certain products you can’t, like chicken. They won’t let you sell meat. Certain products that can really make you sick. I try to stay away from meats as much as possible. When it comes to not inside a factory.

We were talking beforehand that Central America has found your company. Why do you suppose and what kinds of things are they designing or developing, if you could say, for Central American market?

We were fortunate enough to have a contact that has several customers in Central America. We are the product development wing of this rather large company. They’ve hired us to do that. Just through I think good business practices and good business relationships. It started with one who recommended to the other, who recommended the other. Luckily, we were in the right place at the right time, I think is how we got those.

That’s usually called hard work somewhere along the line. The palate here in the United States may be focused on one way, I suspect. The palate in Central America may be focused on another. From the development side, what do you think is the most unusual food product that you’ve been working on for down in Central America?

We work on basically the same kind of beverages that’s we have here in the United States. The fruits are a little difference, maybe. There’s nothing really too strange that we’ve worked on that we would consider out of the ordinary here. We have designed some very interesting combinations that these companies would be reluctant to take a risk on, if I can put it that way. We’ve worked on some very fruit and vegetable type combinations of juices that you would never imagine going together. That just gives you the perfect experience. We did a guava-red pepper and this thing was amazing. You would never assume that drinking a red pepper on a hot summer day is desirable, but the two flavors and the experience was just remarkable. Something to that effect. We also work with a lot of coffees and teas and those types of drinks.

There’s a Dunkin Donuts coffee now. There’s a cookie dough coffee they’ve come out with, which would be a line extension. For the folks out there, before I forget, if they need to reach out to you or wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Our website and then send us a message off the website. That’s MileHighFoodScience.com. The other one is you can look me up, Brandon E. Shepherd on LinkedIn. That’s where we get a lot. That’s basically the only social media platform that we’re on.

That’s good for folks because I suspect there will be a few imaginations that will be peaked a little bit and to further down that thought process, I understand that there’s an opportunity for your chewing gum down in Colombia as well.

Colombia is a very open country at this point on cannabis right now. It’s going through some transitions. That’s an exciting market that’s going to open up as well and it’s just happens that we know people in these other countries that are legalizing faster than we are. Let’s take those opportunities while we can.

I’ve heard folks talk about CBD, which I get lost in the math and everything else there, but are you seeing a lot of food product design around that particular segment of the market as well?

It’s