Entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on Colorado’s agricultural resources and business climate now have another route to develop and test out their ideas in Denver.
Colorado State University’s Spur campus, which launched its Food Innovation Center two years ago, aims to help businesses find the resources they need to be successful. The center and its team of food scientists invite participants to develop food products and identify potential markets for them, driving economic development in the state.
Inside, you’ll find a commercial kitchen, a sensory testing lab and a soon-to-open dairy center, among other specialized testing facilities.
Mike Gable, director of the Food Innovation Center, said that businesses both large and small come to the center for help with quality control, creating a nutrition facts panel or just to make sure that their product tastes good.
“The Food Innovation Center is really set out to support food entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. [From] people saying, ‘I want to get my grandmother's recipe into supermarkets,’ [to] the people that say, ‘I've launched brands before, I just need a food scientist to help me with shelf life,” Gabel said.
The sensory lab on site has a database of roughly 1,700 registered “taste buds” – or people who are paid to try everything from tonic water to sausage.
“[They] just say, ‘right, that's good, but I prefer sample A versus sample B’, or ‘I don't taste any difference between these two’. And so that really is something helpful for a lot of the companies before they go forward with [their] launch,” Gable said.
Sensory manager Martha Calvert builds the taste testing list around versatility. If a company wants to isolate a particular age group or see how their product will do with a Hispanic audience, she can bring together the specific type of focus group they need.
People wanting to join the list of taste buds need no special training, but if you’d like to learn how to describe food more accurately, Calvert offers the opportunity to go through a training program and serve on the descriptive panel. Right now, that panel includes about 20 trained testers with the ability to accurately describe the levels of fruitiness or earthiness in products. The group is split up into categories with specializations like wine, chocolate, and beer.
‘You forget how rich Colorado Agriculture is’
Beyond product development, the Food Innovation Center was also created to help agricultural producers draw revenue by turning their harvests into value-added products. For the many peach and apple producers on the Western Slope, this can look like learning to freeze-dry their fruit or turn it into a puree for breweries.
“You forget how rich Colorado agriculture is,” said Gabel. “I think when you live in the Front Range, you really kind of miss that. In the San Luis Valley, we have one of the best table potato productions, we have a lot of corn production, we have a lot of beef production. We have growers, producers, and ranchers thinking about innovation.”
Down the hall from the sensory lab, Gabel says they’ve just installed equipment for pasteurizing and homogenizing milk at the dairy lab, which should be operational by the end of the year. With the state doing more than a billion dollars in milk sales last year, the center’s users will be able to experiment with products like cheese and ice cream.
“Last January we asked people to help us come up with the Spur signature ice cream. The top one was called Mineral Mountain. It is a chocolate ice cream base with caramel toffee bites and brownie bites,” Gabel said. “So fantastic, and yeah, indulgent.”
The center also recently added a melanger and other equipment for processing cocoa to make chocolate, which will help the Willy Wonkas of the world create the perfect truffle, peppermint bark or chocolate-covered treat. On Dec. 14, families can see the campus in action for free at the upcoming Winter Wonder event.
“You can come in, you can watch some of the entrepreneurs we work with producing their products in the kitchen. It’s an opportunity, especially [for] the younger crowd, to come in and see where their food comes from,” said Gabel.
