Quality ingredients can have a true impact on the taste of food that is served at a restaurant. These ingredients are enhanced based on their freshness and the natural nature that the best ones bring to the table. Without using the best ingredients, the greatest chef’s creation is only going to be mediocre, not living up to its true taste potential.

Focusing in on Fresh Ingredients

How fresh ingredients are can play a factor in the taste of food. If a chef is working with old chicken or fish, those proteins are going to lose out on their flavor. The same can be said if the proteins were frozen and then defrosted. When food is frozen, it is going to naturally lose a lot of the juicy and natural taste that it had before it was put in that state. The best ingredients are those that are brought to the restaurant fresh, refrigerated, and used before they get to the point where they have to be frozen to be preserved.

The same can be said for vegetables. Have you ever eaten a salad that has sat in the fridge too long? Fresh vegetables are full of taste that can blast throughout your mouth. When you use old vegetables in dishes, though, you are just not going to get the taste out of them that fresh ones would give. This is why chefs always push to use the most fresh vegetables and proteins that they can get their hands on.

No Preservatives and Minimize the Additives

Food can be enhanced in ways that are not necessarily the most natural or healthy. Food that is stored for long periods of time in the freezer are likely to have preservatives in them to maintain their appearance of being fresh. This harms the taste of the food and is not as healthy as going with naturally fresh food.

Additives are another thing to consider. A meal can be enhanced with tons of spices, salt, and pepper to help hide the lack of taste in dishes. This limits the chef’s ability, though, to create a naturally tasty meal with the core ingredients at hand.

The end result of a great restaurant meal stems from a chef that is creative and has the ability to work with ingredients that are of high quality. This allows them to use their creativity to create food that restaurants are going to be proud to serve and guests are going to crave. It is up to the restaurant, though, to get the chefs the ingredients they need to make it all a success.

However, just because this store aisle looks like the way to go doesn’t necessarily mean its the best place in the grocery or convenience store for your product to succeed. Understanding how supermarkets are set up is a great way to learn how to improve your products’ chances of making their way into a customers shopping cart.

Planograms

Whenever consumers look at neatly arranged shelves, they’re really looking at live planograms. A planogram is a visual representation of product shelving that is used to maximize capacity and sales. Every field sales and marketing team can benefit from using planograms to aim for more profitable product placement.

Product Placement Strategy

Supermarkets have a method to their madness when organizing their in store product placement strategy. Just like you, they know that consumers have a difficult time sticking to their grocery shopping list, no matter how determined they are. This is good for CPG brands because that means your product has the opportunity to chosen! Below are some of the clever ways stores place goods to maximize profit.

Cross Merchandising

Cross merchandising is the practice of placing complimentary goods together to grow basket size and drive impulse purchases. This product placement strategy is successful because often when consumers purchase something, they tend to think what else could go well with it.

Popular examples include wine and cheese, pasta and pasta sauce, and solo cups and ping pong balls. If your product goes well with something else in the store, it would be a great idea to bring up co-branding the two goods to the store owner. Not only could this increase the sales of your product, but it shows the store owner that you’re thinking about them too.

“Eye-Level Is Buy-Level”

This phrase is probably associated more with shelf placement than any other. For exactly this reason, the eye level shelf real estate is the most expensive because it’s the most valuable to brands. However, there is even more to this idea. There are a few studies that suggest that similar to reading, we scan shelf space from left to right. If you can’t get into the prime, center real estate in a store aisle, learning which side, left or right, works best for your product will help your field teams maximize profits from store product placement and displays.

In-Store Product Placement Best Practices

Now that you know more about how supermarket product placement works, here are three things you can do to improve your in-store performance in 2019.

Negotiating Shelf Placement

Obviously, when you enter a new store, the owner won’t just give you the best shelf placement. Be prepared to explain why your product deserves that real estate you want for it. Remember, nobody knows your product’s strengths better than you do and negotiating with the grocery store owner is the ideal time to highlight those strengths.

A great way to back up your statements is by using data. Retailers want to know how your product will increase their profit margin. Providing evidence to them that your brand can perform as well as or better than your competitors will not only help your chances of entering a new store but of also getting the shelf space you desire. Any information you have concerning revenue, how your product should be displayed and promoted in stores and consumer demographics will go a long way towards helping your product succeed.

Dealing With Slotting Fees

It’s extremely likely that you’ll be faced with slotting fees, up-front costs retailers ask of manufacturers to guarantee them a spot on the shelf. While some big retailers have done away with slotting fees altogether, many of the nation’s grocery giants, big box stores, and convenience stores still require them.

While slotting fees are certainly a roadblock for many growing brands, suppliers with a good data story can negotiate their way out of them. Here are three ways you might be able to get out of coughing up for your facings: 

1. Recognize the role of logistics: 

Understand how product arrangement in supermarkets and supply chain management factor into the price of a slotting fee. The more you can reduce the costs associated with stocking your product, the more likely you are to receive shelf placement and have leverage over how much you pay to play.

2. Drive growth through sales and marketing

Retailers need proof that your brand will sell should they decide to carry it. This can be accomplished with documentation of historical performance and a solid plan for how to move product in stores.

3. Prove demand for your brand

What makes your brand stand out? What can your company offer the retailer that others can’t? Show buyers why passing up on your product is a mistake.

Commercial or high-speed bakeries rely on advanced processing technology and high-quality ingredients to consistently deliver delicious and nutritious baked goods to their customers. Quality control for ingredients and raw materials is an essential part of food safety and quality management systems. These are commonly documented and implemented by industrial food processors and commercial bakeries.

There are many baking ingredients, these include but are not limited to:

• Flour
• Process water
• Yeast
• Granulated, refined sugar
• Liquid sweeteners
• Eggs
• Milk solids
• Salt
• Enzymes
• Dough conditioners
• Hydrocolloids / gums
• Preservatives

How it works

Quality control of ingredients involves eight basic steps:¹

1. Establishing specifications for each ingredient based on its chemical composition, nature and technological functionality
2. Performing standardized tests and analyzing samples
3. Comparing results against a standard or expected property value
4. Accepting or rejecting a lot or batch of ingredients received at the bakery upon purchasing
5. Communicating results with suppliers
6. Implementing corrective actions to close any gaps regarding the quality of a given material
7. Improving any condition in a given ingredient that might have the potential to negatively affect the quality of the baked goods
8. Recording all out-of-specification incidences for the benefit of monitoring and supplier reviews.

The starting point for the quality control of baking ingredients is the establishment of specifications. They should be properly set by the R&D department and mutually agreed between supplier and bakery in terms related to the use and against reasonable analytical procedures. The QA/QC department should be able to make analytical checks using similar methods to those in the supplier’s laboratory.

Application

Quality control for baking ingredients encompasses:

• Physicochemical parameters related to technological functionality (e.g. solids content, protein content, ash content, moisture content, particle size distribution)
• Microbiological specifications (aerobic mesophilic count, mold count, absence of pathogenic bacteria)
• Maximum or permissible levels of food contaminants (e.g. mycotoxins and heavy metals)
• Rheological tests, both fundamental and empirical (e.g. farinograph, mixolab, alveograph, RVA)
• Specialized tests (e.g. yeast gassing power, fermentable solids, enzyme level/activity)

In an ideal world a bakery would make each product with exactly the same quality characteristics, and this would satisfy customers 100% of the time. However, in the real world, bakers know that their products will have some slight variations in the production process. Bakery managers and plant staff should measure these variations and exert control over them in such a way that the consumers do not notice big variations in product quality.

Food Safety

Quality control of ingredients is the first line of defense against inherent process and ingredient variability. Generally speaking, customer complaints normally can be classified into the following categories:

• Foreign material in the finished product. This could be anything from dirt, whole wheat dough in a white pan bread, sesame seeds in a product that should not contain them, pieces of cloth, brittle plastic, glass, metal, etc. In summary, the product contains something that does not belong there.
• Violation of label declarations. This happens if a product is underweight, contains an undeclared allergen, or does not comply with labeled amounts of sodium, fat, or trans-fat.
• Shelf life issues. This could be due to the presence of mold or undesirable change in texture as in the case of stale bread.
• Off-flavors or off-aromas. This could be due to undesirable enzymatic activity or microorganisms.
• Poor product quality. This could involve breakdown of icings, melting of chocolate enrobing, bread with low volume, cakes with too open grain and tunneling, texture problems, color problems, symmetry problems.
• Physically damaged product. Smashed, leaking, change of appearance.

How often a given ingredient is tested or analyzed should be based on how critical the raw material is or how important it is for keeping product quality. For example, wheat flour and yeast should have specific quality control schedules and procedures to always have the best materials for bread and cakes production

Clean label

The clean label trend is forcing bakers to replace traditional dough conditioners with functional enzymes which can provide similar functionality and dough/batter processability. In this case, enzymes become a critical and key ingredient that ensures the quality characteristics expected by customers. In such scenarios it would be reasonable to implement testing methods to assess enzymatic activity of amylases, oxidases, lipases and xylanases.