In good taste

A year ago, Kylan Ganger, a recent business school graduate, had a newly acquired taste for tonic water and a dream of launching his own business.

Now, after a few months of intensive product development work involving experts at CSU Spur's Food Innovation Center, he has three tonic recipes along with natural ingredients, a new website, and a rented storage space in Longmont holding about 15,000 self-designed cans of his own Antiqua tonic water.

"I have something that I'm passionate about and that I'm excited to sell," Ganger said. "It's been a surreal experience going from this thing I had in my mind to a physical product."

Helping entrepreneurs develop products and find markets is among the ways that CSU Spur supports innovation and drives economic development. If a passion is the heart of entrepreneurship, the Food Innovation Center is equipped to play the role of a well-conditioned circulatory system. After meeting with Ganger in January and coming to understand his goals, Caitlin Clark, a CSU Spur food scientist who completed her doctorate at Colorado State University, went to work developing the bitter tonic base and multiple fruit-forward variants.

Following an iterative process defined by experimentation and punctuated with regular tastings, Ganger came away with recipes for tonics that are safe, shelf stable, and, true to his taste, delicious. "I'm so psyched," he said.

Caitlin Clark experiments with different fruit combinations while developing recipes for Kylan Ganger's tonic water.

Developing and refining food products is just one of the overlapping and complementary activities emanating from the Food Innovation Center, based in CSU Spur's Terra building. The center includes the Ardent Mills Teaching and Culinary Center commercial kitchen, a sensory testing lab, the soon-to-open Leprino Foods Dairy Innovation Center, and other multi-purpose labs. Its activities reach through the Terra building, across the Spur campus, and beyond.

"It's really about being a good resource for the community and for industry," said Mike Gabel, director of the Food Innovation Center.

The kitchen, behind large windows on the first floor of the Terra building, is the setting for ice cream-making demonstrations, community pizza nights, and a multitude of other hands-on activities and culinary displays. The kitchen also serves as a commissary for local businesses, including growing start-ups such as Roxy's Remixes, a purveyor of complex cocktail mixes, and Sun Ghee, which makes small-batch clarified butter in spiced and straight-up varieties.

Adjacent to the kitchen, the sensory lab is a regular destination for tastings of everything from granola bars and strawberries to sausage and pizza. In most studies, participants get paid to try samples and give feedback. CSU Spur, with a database of about 1,700 registered tasters, is increasingly valuable as a resource to businesses trying to figure out how different groups react to their products.

Down the hall, equipment for pasteurizing and homogenizing milk has been installed at the dairy lab, which is on track to be operational by the end of the year and will provide space for producers to experiment while developing new cheeses, ice creams, and other dairy products. In another lab, a producer was recently working on a new variety of sausage patty in a space originally intended for meat products. Now, with the addition of a melanger and other equipment for processing cocoa and making chocolate, this lab will also allow production of specialty truffles and other products, all in line with Clark's background in the chocolate industry.

"We're leaning into our expertise as we carve out a niche," said Gabel, a CSU alumnus (food science and human nutrition, '02).

A vocabulary of taste

In just over a year as the first sensory manager at CSU Spur, Martha Calvert has built a list of tasters with a view toward versatility. A company might want to know how a product does with a particular age group or within an ethnic group such as the Hispanic community; she has people to contact.

For most taste tests, no special training or preparation is required beyond a clean palate, meaning no coffee or smoking for at least an hour before the test. For those who want to take taste testing to the next level, with the ability to confidently describe foods and beverages on such attributes as their degree of fruitiness, ripeness, or earthiness, Calvert offers training to serve on a descriptive panel. Currently, she has about 20 trained panelists who've been part of multi-session panels devoted to a particular product category such as wine, chocolate, or non-alcoholic beer.

Nicholas Trujillo, at right, and otherdescriptive panel participantsusetaste and aromareferences to orient their palates.

At week two of a descriptive panel focused on chocolate, nine tasters took their places inside a Terra classroom at stations arranged with three samples of dark chocolate, an iPad to record their ratings, and a whole set of taste and aroma references to calibrate their perceptions. A whiteboard catalogued dozens of descriptors the group used during the previous session to describe chocolate and the experience of eating it. Tasters described earlier samples as milky, malty, buttery, or spicy. They picked up on tastes of nine kinds of fruit from dried apples and coconutto citrusand strawberry. They detected aromas that were herbal, grassy, woody, or leathery.

"You are going to find it's really hard to evaluate the intensity of all these attributes," Calvert said at the outset.

Standing at the white board, wielding a black marker, Calvert talked the group through the process of whittling down their chocolate taste vocabulary, crossing out overly specific or overlapping descriptors, including "dark roasted" and "light roasted" coffee, which turned out to be difficult to distinguish from straight "coffee." As the tasters worked through the chocolate samples and recorded their impressions, Calvert monitored their ratings. "You guys were very consistent with each other," she said. "That's great."

Members of the group brought different connections to the food industry and levels of familiarity with food science. Clark was there, as was Nicholas Trujillo, a chef and food scientist who works at CSU Spur as the Food Innovation Center's operations manager.

Others were community members or Spur volunteers. Ramona Roof, a Denver resident with a background in marketing, first learned about the sensory lab while reading a newspaper's weekend event calendar. When her mother was visiting one weekend, she decided to bring her to Spur for a 2ndSaturday to check out the Dumb Friends League Veterinary Hospital in the Vida building and to participate in a taste test. They received $25 to try samples of Polish sausage.

Roof kept coming back for taste tests, participating in a descriptive panel training focused on white wine before joining the series on chocolate. The discussion at descriptive panels can become technical, she said, recalling the back-and-forth on the differing aromas of grass clippings, peat moss, and peat humus. She laughed talking about the distinction, and yet she has savored the chance to learn such subtleties and explore the possibilities of taste testing. "I wanted to test my theory that I had a good palate," she said.

Food companies now look to Spur to evaluate their products and to see how well they hold up after sitting on a shelf for weeks or months. Calvert is looking ahead at evaluating fresh produce, including what is grown at CSU Spur, to see how flavor, texture, and other characteristics vary around the moment of peak freshness. "Food is so much more complicated than most people think it is," she said.

Martha Calvert guides the group in refiningthelist ofattributesthey will use to evaluate chocolatesamples.

Getting to the start

In April, working on Ganger's tonic beverage, Clark experimented with bitter bases that included ingredients such as horehound root, quassia bark, and gentian root. She developed multiple fruit blends, one starring cherry and dragonfruit, and then she mixed tonic samples for an impromptu tasting in the Terra kitchen with Calvert and other colleagues.

Clark, after sipping one of the samples, bright red and fizzy, concluded there was still work to be done. "It doesn't taste like cherry or dragonfruit," she said. "What if we tried dragonfruit with banana? Or guava?"

Now, Ganger has completed the first phase of product development, and he recently dropped off at CSU Spur some samples of Antiqua water: a citrusy original; a raspberry variant that includes dragonfruit; and another flavor featuring yuzu and lime.

Clark is now working to develop other products, including a salad dressing with live apple cider vinegar and a dog treat that uses human food. While developing a recipe that can be scaled up and sent to a manufacturer is a major aim of her work, the process doesn't end there. A year ago, she worked with Jon Katz on a snack bar free of ingredients known to trigger migraines.

The oat-based bars that Clark developed were delicious, but also fragile, so there was follow-up work that involved strengthening the bar using migraine-friendly konjac gum as a stabilizer.

Katz, a Texas-based entrepreneur who started getting migraines when he was 7, decided to create these bars and launch his own business after experiencing a particularly severe cluster of 12 migraines in three weeks. Now, he's co-founder of Amia, which offers original, cinnamon, and coconut varieties of its snack bars, all of them free of migraine triggers.

The bars have proven popular, Katz said, even beating out a popular, non-migraine-friendly snack bar brand in a head-to-head tasting. And in June, Jennifer Morrison, an actor and filmmaker with her own history of migraines, joined Katz as an Amia co-founder. "I think we're off to a good start," Katz said.

Food Innovation Center staff are often busy during 2nd Saturdays at CSU Spur, including in September, when the campus hosted the Colorado Food Showcase. More than 900 people attended the event, which highlighted 32 early stage companies that make hot sauces, keto cookies, fruit powder, granola, and a variety of other food products and drinks. Buyers from area grocery stores were also there to scope out new products.

In October, 2nd Saturday attendees had the chance to taste and judge three unique flavors of ice cream. These flavors were finalists from a competition started earlier in the year to propose what will become the CSU Spur signature flavor. By the time of the National Western Stock Show in January, the Food Innovation Center should have the tools in place to produce the winning flavor of ice cream in-house.