Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur Episode 7

In Episode 7 of Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur, I talk about experimenting with making Lacto-fermented pickles and performing some market research. I was really interested in learning about lacto-fermented pickles because I had been reading some articles about the potential benefits that lacto-fermented foods may have on gut health. So I decided the way I wanted to explore and learn more about lacto-fermented pickles was to make them myself. To do this, I split my approach into three categories - Formulation, Manufacturing, and Market Research. Initial formulation was primarily comprised of finding a recipe, tweaking the recipe, and finding the variety of pickling cucumber.  Manufacturing (at an extremely small scale - a couple of jars at a time) involved writing down detailed explanations on how to make the pickles. This included, washing the jars, how many pickling cucumbers went into a jar, how long to boil the brine I wanted to use, how long I needed to store the pickles in brine at room temperature, and how long to store them in refrigerated temperatures. This is just to name a few, but the goal was to write down as many details as I could. Market Research, I thought, was an extremely important category. The purpose was to gauge how much interest in lactofermented pickles there was. If not, I would have gone back to the drawing board and tried to play around with finding a food item people may be interested in. I also used the market research to guide how I changed the formulation or manufacturing process over time.  For example, in this episode I was able to get a group of people (mainly family members, but some peers of family members) to try the pickles I had made and I wrote notes on what they would say. Their input would guide decisions such as reducing the salt content, increasing the number of days the pickles spent at room temperature during the fermentation process.  I am under the impression that the method I am talking about:   1. Creating a baseline formulation, 2. Creating a written manufacturing process in detail 3. performing market research can be used across a wide range of products. The purpose of using this method was to establish a market research and data influenced feedback loop that could direct the development of the food product over time.       IN HINDSIGHT Since I recorded this episode I've stopped working on my lacto-fermentated pickle project. This is due to something that will be revealed on a later podcast that I don't want to spoil for you now. I also want to remind you that I was still using a video game microphone in a coffee cup, with a kitchen towel over it to help block out some of the hard P's and S's you may be hearing. As far as formulation goes, back then I did not own a proper scale to weigh ingredients on, but now I have more equipment. I think it is important to weigh ingredients when formulating a food product in order to create a price breakdown for the product. A metric like price/gram of each ingredient used can make a huge difference when figuring out how to price a product. Also, weighing ingredients can lead to a more consistent product.   For manufacturing, I think I did pretty well. I took a lot of photos, and I think I have some video of the process I was using as well. What I wish I did differently (that I learned later on) was to time myself on each step of the manufacturing process. Getting a time for each step, helps determine a total manufacturing time. You never know when this information can help! My Market Research was very family oriented. This was partly because I was nervous to ask strangers to try 'an experimental food item'. In hindsight, I would be curious to learn more from strangers.