Recipe… Formula, same thing, right?
No! It is important to get your food or beverage recipe converted to a formula before you even start looking to commercialize your product. If you are going to be a real-life food business, start acting like one and get your product recipe converted to a formula so you’ll be ready to scale up when it’s time!
We talked to Food Scientist Rachel Zemser to give us some advice on how to convert your homemade recipe to a professional industrial formula.
This is a common question asked by first-time entrepreneurs, and if you present your homemade kitchen recipe (still scribbled on a napkin in grandma’s handwriting) to a co-packer, they are guaranteed to run for the hills.
What is the difference between a recipe and a formula?
A recipe is what you make at home, using cups, tablespoons, and pinches. A formula is how a professional specialty-food manufacturer documents your information in pounds, kilograms, grams, and other weight measurements. These weights are converted to relative percentages and then used to make any amount or batch size of your product.
So put on your scientist hat and get to work. Here is an example of a homemade chocolate chip cookie recipe converted to weights.
Yes, literally weigh it out!
Right from the start, always document your formula by weight. That’s how to ensure the formula remains consistent from bench-top preparation through final production.
Now that you have converted to weight, you can easily break it into percentages, which is a necessary step in developing your formula.
Converting grams to percentages is a straightforward process. Simply add up the total grams of all your ingredients (in this sample formula, the total weight is 1399.8) and then divide each individual ingredients weight by the total.
Although this is a very basic example, it gives you an idea of how to convert your recipe to a formula. Once you are ready to begin working with a co-packer, you will get the formula tested and approved in your manufacturing facility.
The reason it is so important to get your food recipe converted to a formula is now you can easily and accurately scale your production up or down without sacrificing quality. And as we all know, Quality Is Everything!