Scaling up in the big kitchen!

It is one thing to conduct R&D in your personal kitchen. It is another thing altogether to scale to production batch size. We went from a 4 quart sauce pan in the research phase to cooking 30 gallons of habanero sauce for our small batch series. One learning that we had was the process. What works at home in the kitchen doesn't necessarily work in the commercial kitchen. Because the equipment is larger and more general purpose we found that special processes were more difficult to execute.

Bottling is one such example. You can quickly fill about 8 bottles from a small sauce pan at home but here we had to fill well over 500 bottles while maintaining quality and safety standards to assure that all requirements were met. This was a daunting task that required 4 people to move in harmony and to keep a specific timing going in filling, cleaning, sealing, and inverting the bottles.

Although the numbers sound impressive, this yield of 500+ is quite small and considered small-batch. We're thus able to bring the same quality, flavor, consistency, color to each bottle exactly as we intended it to be during the R&D stage.

We're thankful that each recipe contains less than one dozen ingredients. This makes it easier to maintain quality. It makes us think about automotive production where 15,000 parts need to fit together the right way to build an operating automobile!!