A product’s journey to market can be a winding, wandering, convoluted affair. Delicious gold-standard recipes get put through a dizzying array of hand-offs from benchtop to pilot to commercial production. Compromises get made in the name of minimum order quantities, label concerns, shelf stability, processing functionality and the whims of the production facility. The products that emerge from that path often end up tasting like a lackluster wedding band covering what was once a vibrant hit song.

Scaling flavor is one of the most difficult lines to walk in the food world. This workshop will lay out the fundamental principles of flavor science and perception, along with concrete culinary strategies for improving the fidelity of your products as they go from test kitchen to retail shelf. We'll dig into how flavor is extracted, concentrated, destroyed and lost; how to design flavor profiles to match your matrix; how to vet ingredient sources; and how to troubleshoot scaling problems on the fly. It will all be tied together with interactive discussion and tastings, so come fully caffeinated.

About Ali Bouzari
Ali Bouzari is a culinary scientist, author, educator and co-founder of Pilot R+D, a culinary research and development company based in Northern California. As a chef with a Ph.D. in food biochemistry, Ali has helped to lead the charge in changing the way we think about cooking by teaching and developing curriculum at top universities, from Ivy League schools to the Culinary Institute of America, and collaborating with the country’s most innovative restaurants including Benu, Eleven Madison Park, the Restaurant at Meadowood and the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. His book, Ingredient: Unveiling the Essential Elements of Food, won the 2017 IACP award for Best Reference Book.