How we develop new condiments: Part 1

Companies are often cagey about this stuff, worried that someone is going to steal some special IP that they've developed 😂 In our minds though, our brand is the thing that distinguishes us and you can't recreate that overnight (yet... maybe AI will just copy and republish all our content soon ROFL).

So here's part 1 of how we approach developing new products. We'll look at how we have ideas, researching recipes, sourcing ingredients and having a first pop. Part 2 will cover everything else.

Step 1: Dump all of our ideas.

Step 2: Bring our 4 best ideas to the Maniacs.

It's during this next step that Club Maniac becomes so vital.

We take our 4 favourite ideas at that given time and offer them up for our members to vote on. Prior to launching Club Maniac, we'd just have to guess what we thought would be the most popular amongst our ideas. Now we don't need to.

We have a group of condiment enthusiasts that are keen to have their say. Honestly, sometimes the results have surprised me too. The above vote is a great example. I was convinced that Bloody Mary Hot Sauce was going to be in the top 2, but Peach and Habanero Jam shot straight to the top. Who new?!

Of our 4 favourite ideas, we'll now look to develop the top 2 and those are the ones that go into the next Club Maniac box along with all the other goodies.

Step 3: Research the idea.

After we know what we're going to make we enter a research phase. This can look different for different products. For example when developing Onion Gravy Ketchup that product didn't exist before, so we were largely focused on what ingredients we'd need to make a ketchup that tasted like gravy. It involved a lot of Googling recipes, nothing fancy.

For the Irish Spice Bag Seasoning that we're working on now however, a seasoning of this kind does already exist, just not readily in the UK and not as a stand alone product. It's made in-house at restaurants.

So we've decided to actually go to Dublin and try it for ourselves. Yeah it's a nice jolly, yeah it's tax deductible, but more importantly it's the only way that we can guarantee getting an authentic flavour. Not just someone else's take on it. 

And of course we'll video everything too. Especially me getting several pints of the black stuff.

Step 4: 'Sauce' the ingredients.

This is probably the least sexy but most important part of the whole process. We've been doing a lot of sourcing recently as we're determined to make a ketchup that is 100% British. Down to even the sugar the goes into it (hence the screen shot 😂).

 The ingredients we use have to do a few things for us to consider them you see. They need to be delicious (obvs), plant based (so everyone can eat them) and also reliable in their supply.

That's something that we learned the hard way. If you need to make thousands of bottles year-round you can't rely on some backyard ingredients from an eBay seller. They've got to be consistent.

Again there's no massive secret to this process. Just lots of Googling and then emailing people who are mostly not very helpful but sometimes amazing 😆

Step 5: The 'Zero F*%ks' attempt

I'm a big believer in getting stuck in. 

Yeah you don't need to go in totally blind. You might get a rough idea of ratios by researching similar recipes, but there's such a thing as being too prepared. That's why I call this the zero f*%ks attempt (Sorry I've only redacted that because this email will go to spam if not 👀).

The beauty of this is there's nothing to lose. Don't overthink it, just follow your heart. At the very least you're going to mess it up massively and learn something.

Great example: The above image is an attempt I made at pasteurising a vegan mayo that I'm working on. It did NOT go well 😂

Jen called it the oobleck as it acted like a non-newtonian fluid... embarrassing. My point is, we all mess up. All the time.

The most important thing is learning how to iterate! But we'll go into that in Part 2 😈