Culinology® Tackles Tolerance Testing

Candidates hoping for a spot on the General Mills Bakeries & Foodservice culinary team should enter the interview with two key qualifications in hand: a solid foundation of foodservice experience and an open mind about yellow cake mix. “One of the things that we do when our candidates come in and apply for a job, is we give them a homework assignment,” explains Denise Salisbury, director of the Culinary Center for General Mills’ Bakeries & Foodservice division in Minneapolis. “We send them a case of baking mix—a yellow cake mix—and they have to come up with 10 ideas of what to do with this yellow cake mix other than make a cake.”

As you might suspect, Salisbury’s seen every idea in the book—some twice. “They can really go off the page,” she notes. “We’ve had it used as a Japanese pancake with stir-fried vegetables rolled up in it. We’ve had it as a crust of a savory quiche. We’ve had it as a pink peppercorn and rosemary biscotti.” One applicant even used the mix to coat oven-fried potatoes and make a “dough” for wrapping salmon fillets. They hired him. “The interview process gives us a real sample of their ability to combine foods,” she says.

And it’d better. When your audience consists of culinary professionals—as does the Bakeries & Foodservice division’s—your design team needs to share their nolimits creativity. But culinary chops only get you so far. Without the discipline to systematize, analyze and execute, even the cleverest ideas prove no more than culinary theorizing.

Organizations like General Mills seal success through a symbiosis that balances culinary and R&D sensibilities. It’s this give and take that got the company’s Pillsbury Place & Bake Muffins off the drawing board and into bakeries and cafés across the country—and provides a glimpse of Culinology® in action.

The foodservice orientation underscores the vital function that both the Culinary Center and the Bakeries & Foodservice team play. “Foodservice is very different from retail,” Salisbury explains. “My team offers training opportunities to really help marketing and R&D understand what a foodservice operator is and how they are different from a retail consumer.”

Note that this mission doesn’t involve actual product formulation—that is a job for R&D. At General Mills, culinary services may synapse regularly with R&D during a product’s gestation, but, says Salisbury, “Once products are developed, we get a first look at them from an operator perspective, where we ask, ‘Does this product meet an operator’s expectations? Does it handle appropriately? Does it meet back-of-house needs?’ We start applying an operator filter to these products and really work toward making sure that they’re going to be successful when they launch.”

They bring to their task a high level of boots-on-the-ground experience, Salisbury points out. “I have a staff of 13 people who report to me,” she says, “and, until recently, they were all chefs who have culinary arts degrees and 7 to 10 years of foodservice operations experience”—a non-negotiable qualification. She emphasizes team members need that deep a history to understand what a product faces when it rolls onto the bumpy road of realworld foodservice performance.

So, Salisbury prides herself in cultivating a team whose members have “been in the trenches. They’ve been back-of-house. We have people who are former restaurant operators, college and university foodservice directors, hotel pastry chefs, in-store bakery directors—people who’ve been out there and know what it means to be back-of-house and have those needs for efficiency, space constraints and the reality of what an operator is going to do with a product. That operator perspective is really what the chef brings to the party here.”

Without it, tolerance testing would be a hollow exercise. Consider how an operator perspective intensifies the evaluation of a frozen product. “We might need some freeze/thaw stability from it,” Salisbury points out. “And, while the product may be designed to be put on the baking tray frozen, the reality is that it might sit on the operator’s dock for two or three hours before it gets to the freezer. Or, the reality might be that they forgot to pull it out of the freezer if it was supposed to thaw.” The culinary team bridges the gap between operational ideals and what really goes on. “The chef’s been there,” she continues. “And, while an R&D person may visit some accounts and try to learn back-of-house procedures, what you see when you’re there observing may be very different than what goes on when you’re not there.”

What her team lacked, then, was “the experimental- design mindset,” Salisbury says. “We didn’t have the data-analysis mindset. We didn’t have the habit of objective data collection and interpretation. We had operator understanding, but we didn’t necessarily have that skill set that was going to give R&D what they needed” to reengineer a product whose tolerance fell short. “And that,” she says, “is why we ended up with the culinologist that we have on staff now.”

Not only did Nordness supply that strength, but she brought a track record with bakery applications, too. And best of all, she’s got a keen palate. As Salisbury points out, “She has a passion for and outside interest in culinary pursuits.” In other words, she’s not just a food scientist, she’s a foodie scientist.

That no doubt helped her hit it off with her culinary colleagues, with whom, Salisbury says, “she had to establish her credibility.” Salisbury had her “go through that same exercise that I made the chefs go through”—namely, the cakemix challenge—“so she has, to a certain extent, had to prove herself in the kitchen.”

But the respective roles of the culinarians and the culinologist remain sharply defined. Nordness “is responsible for our recipe system and evaluating and verifying them and making sure that they’re standardized,” Salisbury says, describing a bookkeeping function that doesn’t fall so much under the purview of the chefs on board. What’s more, she adds, Nordness has “had to kind of push back on the chefs and set specific standards for them to follow, and she has done very well in that regard.”

This push and pull between the wide-open culinary sensibility and R&D’s step-by-step approach, far from causing tension, is the secret to General Mills’ product-development proficiency. “It’s good to get the culinary perspective up front,” Salisbury says. “It expands the mindset of the scientist. They can go off on something that would make a scientist say, ‘Wow. I never even thought of doing it that way.’”

And, while the culinologist can engage in that blue-sky thinking, too, she “then has to put it into practice,”

Salisbury says. Fortunately, Nordness gets as energized by creative possibilities as by the challenges of seeing them through. That enthusiasm, says Salisbury, “can really fan the flame for the R&D community, too. If you have someone who’s excited about a project and has some ideas of how to execute it, then it helps make that passion and excitement spread throughout the rest of the team.”

With such a novel concept on the line, the tolerance-testing stakes were high. Never having worked with such a technology before, the culinary team was unsure how it would survive the wilds of the foodservice environment. “It certainly makes it much more critical for the tolerance testing to be complete and thorough,” Salisbury says. “But you still expect a muffin to be a muffin.”

So they subjected the pucks to the baking equivalent of a crash test. “We had to run this product through quite a bit of abuse,” Salisbury recalls. “What’s going to happen if it sits out on the receiving dock at the foodservice operation for two hours at 90°F and then gets thrown into the freezer? We put them in warm conditions and asked what that bottom layer of the case would look like. Did it get compressed? Can you still handle it? Do the pucks still separate? We put too many pucks in a muffin cup to see what happens. We arranged them in different ways—does it matter whether you stand them up like books or stack them?”

Thanks to their foodservice experience, the culinary team knew the questions to ask. But when it came time to organize those questions into an experimental design capable of generating reproducible, documented results, “that’s where the culinologist came into play,” Salisbury says. It took a few tries for R&D to work out the kinks and launch a beta version. “After R&D realized what we were doing to the product and what expectations we had, they came back with a product that was going to win with operators and their customers.”

At the end of the day, Salisbury believes that “inherent differences” exist between chefs and scientists. Yet, while she acknowledges that the mindsets are different, “I think the role of culinologists helps bridge those differences.” The old firewall separating the two cultures is beginning to show some wear, as General Mills’ bakeries and foodservice division demonstrates. “A lot of divisions at General Mills have culinary-trained technicians and R&D staff, because we recognize the need and value of those culinary insights early in the product-development process,” she says. “We’re just trying to tap into those wherever and whenever we can.”

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net.