SugarCreek: Brandworthy Food Solutions

The pork that both home and commercial chefs prepare today is a lot different than what was available a century ago. In the past, pigs carried a lot more fat than the lean animals raised today to appeal to the modern diner’s concern about dietary fat and animal fat, in particular. To meet the growing consumer trend, and also to get more meat per animal, pork farmers have sought out and developed breeds that are far leaner and more muscular than their historical counterparts.

When you think about appetizing food attributes, what words come to mind?

The crispness of a water chestnut. The juicy firmness of a blanched carrot. The chewiness of a piece of turkey jerky. The tenderness of a well-prepared filet mignon.

What texture words seem negative to you, off the cuff? Slimy? Viscous? Stale? Tough?

And what of taste? The savory taste of a garlic-buttered crouton. The spicy taste of barbecued pork. How about the mild sweetness of a vine-ripened tomato?

Take away the savory taste of that crouton and you're left with stale bread. Take the sweetness out of the tomato and you're left with something slimy rolling around on your tongue. The point?

Texture and taste work in tandem to produce mouthfeel — the organoleptic (or, overall sensory) experience a consumer receives when he or she samples a food. They are interdependent, and food brands need to consider them equally when developing new products.

These days, grocery shoppers want foods that are fresh, convenient, munchable and full of protein. So how can producers best address these food industry trends? Ready-to-eat (RTE) sous vide-prepped meals and snacks may be just what the industry needs to fulfill demand.

At SugarCreek we’re all about finding the next challenge—how do we match this exact flavor profile, can we find a better way to cook this cut of meat, could we get this food packaged faster— and pushing the boundaries of food innovation.

It used to be that a sous vide setup required significant capital investment and a lot of space for equipment: a large water bath, a water pump, a heat regulator. But in recent years, several innovative, small-scale sous vide circulators designed for the smaller kitchen have made it to market, making the cooking technique a viable experiment for many restaurants, caterers and even home chefs.

So how can you choose the best sous vide setup for your needs? The answer to that question begins with the answer to the question: "What is your intended end use?"

Retailers' shift toward incorporating of more innovative "smart" technologies figures to be a hot trend in the food market in 2015.

According to Food Production Daily's Jenni Spinner, the race is on for retailers to realize more efficiencies and better returns on investment by employing active and intelligent packaging features, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors, nanotech, 3-D printed packaging, organic packaging, printed electronics and even bioelectronics.

Innovation can often come from unexpected sources of inspiration. Take, for example, ColaLife— a United Kingdom-based charity which noticed that deliveries of Coca-Cola, made to virtually every corner of the globe, included quite a bit of empty, unused space between bottles.

Taking a page from the Internet and web-based packet switching— which delivers small groupings of information, using dynamic bandwidth allocation techniques, in response to changing data loads— ColaLife packages much-needed medical supplies, like oral rehydration salts and nutritional supplements, to developing countries by piggybacking shipments and leveraging the empty, inter-bottle spaces on Coca-Cola palettes.

Since its launch in 2010, the scrapbooking site Pinterest has become one of the fastest-growing social media destinations online— particularly appealing to women and high-income users.

Sous vide, a French term meaning "under vacuum," is an incredibly easy method of cooking. A cook loads ingredients all together in a cooking bag, draws the air out so that the food is vacuum-sealed in the pouch, then places the sealed bag in a warm water bath where it cooks slowly and evenly over a long period of time. It's a perfect cooking method for food service that requires large batches— or for busy home cooks who want to set everything up in the morning and arrive home from work or school to find dinner ready to serve.

Cooking in a vacuum? While “under vacuum” may be the basic definition of sous vide, we don’t mean your basic upright Hoover.