Novice looking for guidance - functional RTDs
Hello all,
TLDR: Scroll to the bolded part if you want to skip intro.
Our family business is a teeny-tiny bottling operation. As someone with an educational background in the Humanities and then Business Management @ Uni, I find myself extremely stressed trying to wrap my head around the incredible volume (and diversity) of essentially hard-science type of questions that arise when trying to satisfy customer demands. Turns out I have some natural affinity for these (in the sense that I am curious and actually enjoy learning about these things), but it has not been easy.
My biggest routine concern is beverage stability and safety, especially given that the clients we tend to attract are startups that are looking for ever more complicated functional drinks. And while we do have some experience bottling a just insanely complicated drink for a client (easily contains like 20 functional ingredients, but prepared by a large, expert company), I often worry that I'll fail to account for something and a new clients' otherwise awesome drink will end up spoiling/separating/sedimenting on the shelf. It is hard to come back from that.
To that end, in the past 9 months, I have spent just a stupid amount of effort and resources (mostly the company's decade-long cache of good will; "social" type of resources) to find help, including from formal formulation houses. I have offered to pay good will deposits that will only be deductible should we place an order that covers their MOQ for such a drink, or even never. For whatever reason, I have not been successful, with most such suppliers/manufacturers/formulators requiring multiple months of time to even get me a sample that can be showcased to the client. Clients, however, are fickle and the moment they hear "Formulation will take up to 3 to 5 months" they just up and leave.
An actual recent answer I have received for the lack of communication on a project is, and I quote, "This is partially an artistic/creative effort. It can take anywhere between 3 and 90 work days". I get it and do agree to an extent, but this is not an acceptable answer to give a prospective customer. As I said, they just up and leave.
One idea I've had is to look for freelance formulators, but the issue is that I can never be 100% (or even 80%) sure that a client will end up placing an order or not. My motto for this is that 1 in 10 or 20 or 30 doors will open. In addition, both in absolute terms and in currency exchange rate terms, my local $ is pathetically weak. So while I could risk $100 on a client I believe is for real, I imagine that such subject matter freelance experts would be looking for significantly more.
This has put me in a precarious situation where if I want us to have the revenue to purchase new and better equipment (some of it is older than me, and I am in my early 30s), raise employee wages, not just survive but thrive, I have essentially nobody but myself to rely on. This has pushed me into ever deeper recesses of the web to find knowledge and guidance, hence how I ended up here. For better or worse, I have been forced to learn how to formulate a safe and stable beverage. I've been spending multiple 12hr days in my makeshift "lab" formulating different drinks for clients, learning from error and by doing. But even when things are looking good, there's always this concern in the back of my head that the drink will be unstable or spoil on the shelf. I guess I am a worrier.
I am not lazy, however. I am absolutely willing to do the work. This (finally) brings me to my question: the nearest food tech university in my tiny (and sadly, a bit backward) country is 6 hours away from me, making it impossible to enroll unless I figure out some distance-learning scheme. My concerns are:
1/ Theoretical understanding of the subject matter is obviously crucial, but due to the number of complicators in any one recipe, the reality, I feel, is that you usually have to simply test it in the real world. As a remote student, I won't have access to the lab and personal coaching/instruction. I could try and replicate some of the work in my makeshift lab, but it is barebones to say the least, and proper lab equipment is just prohibitively expensive...
2/ In many areas, I worry that the education in our country is not exactly on par with the Western world, and also quite old-school. After so many trials and errors, I am not very scared of formulating a simple lemon or orange flavor beverage with synthetic sweeteners, and herein lies the problem: clients are asking for clear protein drinks, collagen, drinks fortified with minerals, vitamins, nootropics, other alien ingredients. I worry that what I will learn should I go down this path will not be immediately instructive and instead be of a more "general best practices" nature. That is still valuable, but not as valuable as combining that with real-world work.
3/ I cannot stress enough how little I care about an actual diploma. My only interest is knowledge.
Now, obviously, the best way to ensure safety and stability is to do destructive testing/shelf life testing or whatever it is formally called. To the best of my knowledge, however, this is also a months-long process. And before it can take place, a bunch of other pieces of the puzzle, that also require time, must be in place. Clients do not want to listen and instead want to rely on our limited knowledge to a-priori know what is and isn't going to be stable.
What would experts/veterans in this are advise I do?
University of Nebraska and North Carolina both have excellent resources available ..........I would start there
This should also help you a great deal totally worth your time