Welcome to Season 11, Episode 3, of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Jennifer Steiner Pool, president and creator-in-chief of Steiner’s Baking Co., about how to turn a special family recipe into a commercially viable brand. Sponsored by Puratos.

In this episode, we’re tackling the product development challenges that come with creating gluten-free baked goods.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi, Jennifer, welcome back.

Jennifer Steiner Pool: Thanks for having me back. I’m glad I didn’t get kicked off.

Spencer: Oh, my gosh, no way. No way. I love talking to you. Two episodes in, and we have covered a ton of ground. And obviously, we’ve had some discussion around gluten-free because your product — and your flour base — is gluten-free, but this week, I want to focus on one specific aspect, and that is production.

Let’s start with talking about food safety aspects and production. As you’ve grown, what are some of the lessons that you’re learning around things like food safety and sanitation, in production, when you’re creating a gluten-free product?

Steiner Pool: So, great question. It’s complicated. When it was just Jen in our first commercial kitchen, I had a lot more control over every single utensil, surface, how the ingredients were handled. And when you’re talking about gluten-free and as you’re trying to mitigate cross contamination, which is critical, one of the misconceptions is that if every ingredient is gluten-free, then your product, well, lo and behold, be gluten-free. Well, what if I made lunch for my son this morning on regular, what I’ll say conventional bread, and I didn’t have a proper apron on, and there was residue from my son’s bread on my clothing? That’s a problem. That’s why people wear what I’ll call lab coats, right? Not just aprons, but actual full clothing covering because you could drive cross contamination inadvertently on your clothing.

So it’s like that level of detail, as you’re scaling, becomes more and more important the more people you have on the line, and understanding every component of the equipment, and how it’s cleaned, and how it’s stored. All of those things stack up to make a confidently, in our case, gluten-free (other people might be dealing with nuts, etc.) product. Or even, for instance, if ingredients are coming off a truck that has flour on a pallet in the truck, but the butter that we’re buying is on another pallet, and let’s say — because this can happen — flour, of course, is quite light, it travels in the air very easily, so it could settle on our boxes of butter. That’s why when you unpack something like butter, you unpack that in a different part of the warehouse with gloves, then the butter is put on a means of conveyance into the kitchen. It’s all those details, and you don’t think about it right? You’re at home, you have your butter, why would I ever consider the fact that somehow gluten got on my sticks of butter? But in that scenario, it could happen. And certainly, it’s just a matter of the supply chain, and how all of these things come together in the kitchen. And that’s why people, they may not know this, but you’re testing along the way.

So, when we run the production line, we end up doing, I think it’s 21, gluten tests throughout the run. So, you’re testing the equipment before you start. You’re testing the batter. You’re testing the batter from the mixer, then you’re testing the batter when it gets to the depositing mechanisms, then you’re testing the parts in the depositing mechanism. Then you come out of the oven, before you can proceed, you’re testing the finished product. It’s expensive and time-consuming, right? Because your line efficiency is based on throughput. Every one of those instances requires almost 20 minutes to wait for the test. So, you want to make sure going to pass.

Spencer: Yeah. If you don’t pass, then you’re really set back, right?

Steiner Pool: Well, A: then we’re not in compliance with our own zero waste. What am I going to do? I mean, of course I would give the product to the staff, but still, you don’t want to waste all that product. And you’re starting over because what you’ll have to do then — and we did have this happen once — if you fail, now you have to re-clean everything. That could be two hours. And then you have to retest it.

Spencer: I mean, you manufacture, in part, because you didn’t want to bake. You know, you dove into this, and you had to, it was just like, a completely new concept to learn. So, how did you, in your brain, reconcile this balance between food safety and sanitation from the gluten-free aspect, with efficiency, with zero food waste? That’s a hard equation. Like, how did you figure it out? When you’re a marketer, not an engineer. And I’m a journalist, so I can say that with a lot of certainty.

Steiner Pool: When you have principles by which you want to do anything — it doesn’t have to be running a company, it can be running your household — and you’re anchored in them, it helps you see the pathway. So, if my vision is that we are going to have zero waste, we haven’t even discussed sustainability, that’s a whole ‘other conversation we could have.

So, zero waste, which is part of our sustainability program anyway, and gluten-free and clean ingredients, certain things have to happen, in a certain order, or you’ll fail at what you’d started out to do, which was to have zero waste. So, as you’re moving through the process, it’s almost like each little decision tree goes back to that first point. And so even if I’m faced with decisions, which I am every day, on topics that I don’t know anything about, I know that I don’t want to waste any food.

So how am I going to purchase the butter so that I don’t have to throw any butter out? And how am I going to run a batch and use all of the sour cream, because I can’t throw any out, right? That’s our rule.

So, I come to the idea that when I’m looking at batch factoring, I have to use my most perishable ingredient to drive the size of the batch. Now, I don’t know anything about anything. But I know if my most perishable ingredient isn’t going to be thrown out, I better use every last drop of it. That’s actually a great example, someone who knows nothing about baking, nothing about manufacturing food at scale, but I do know I don’t want to throw something out.

And so that’s how someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing can get to a very sensible and financially efficient decision on how to run the line. And I learned that very quickly. So, if sour cream is going to be my issue, and it still is today, right? That’s my most perishable ingredient. Butter can be frozen. Eggs, and now remember we only use real eggs, no funny business, but they can be frozen. Sugar’s not, you know, not an issue. So, you’ve worked through that. And now we know a batch ‘X’ of sour cream and we never waste any sour cream. That’s how I do it. That’s how I bring those things together when I really don’t know anything about them.

Spencer: Manufacturing a gluten-free product, I mean, that testing is really important. Because I mean, just based on the principle and the product that you make, you’re taking those tests very, very seriously. And then, if it fails, then it’s wasted product. It’s like that’s just another layer of risk. Right?

Steiner Pool: Yeah. And on the testing side, as I mentioned, we’ve only ever failed the test once. And I’m not even sure it was a real, you know, you can have a false positive. We’ll never know, right? We just did what we had to do, and we recleaned all the equipment.

But if I’m starting out right, and we have a proper HACCP plan in place, which of course we do, and we’re audited by the Gluten Intolerance Group. So, I feel very confident in the program and the process that we have in place; we’ll always deliver the right end results and keep our consumers safe and happy. I tend not to worry about that as much. It’s burdensome, and we have to do it. But I really don’t worry that we’re not going to pass. You know, I just know that we’re doing things correctly. And I’m really confident in the team.

Spencer: And you have a contract manufacturer for the blending of the flour. Are you manufacturing yourself? Are you working with a co-manufacturer?

Steiner Pool: For the end products, you’re asking?

Co-manufacturer. Praise be sweet baby Jesus, if I may quote Ricky Bobby, I have a co-manufacturer, and I do not make the products myself anymore. And that’s not because I don’t love our consumers; it is simply because there’s no way I could make all this product myself. 

Spencer: Right. I mean, you get to a point where, especially when you know where your lane is, you know where you need to let go.

Steiner Pool: Yeah. I must say, it’s really good, as much as I didn’t like it, that I did all the baking because there isn’t an aspect of my business that I don’t know. There isn’t a point in the supply chain or the production cycle where, first of all, someone could take advantage of me and tell me some cockamamie story that isn’t true because I myself have made every single product, thousands of them. And it also helps me see opportunities to be better.

So, I’ve already learned a lot of lessons, so when we moved in with our co-manufacturer, who I love, there were a lot of lessons we didn’t need to learn. To them, the product was totally new, right? They never made it before. A lot of companies come to their co-manufacturer having never really run the product at scale, which the whole different space-time continuum, when you’re trying to onboard with your co-man, I was able to come in and say, ‘Well, this is how we do it. These four things we shouldn’t be doing, but we’re doing them this way because it was just Jen. Now that we have you, we don’t have to do this.’ So, you know, as much as I hated it, it’s good that I did it.

Spencer: Do you think that experience of making it yourself in that commercial kitchen helped you choose the right manufacturing partner?

Steiner Pool: Yes.

Spencer: I mean, it’s a vetting process from both sides. It’s like any relationship, and it has to be a good fit. And sometimes it’s not a good fit. And then you have to find someone else, or they had all the capabilities that we needed, except for this one thing. What you were saying, about you have firsthand understanding of how it should be made, did that help you find the right co-man?

Steiner Pool: Absolutely. We have, I have what I’ll call a consultant in a director of production seat for us, and he’s a fabulous guy. I adore him.

Together, we were able to really ferret out and vet co-mans. Now, it hasn’t been easy. It took almost six years for me to find the right group. I have to own some responsibility for that. Because we haven’t had the right working capital budget, it makes us — I don’t want to say difficult because I’d like to think of myself as fairly as not difficult — but it’s hard to have a client, and you know this because you’ve spoken to some pretty impressive co-mans, you want to be a good client is the way I want to say that. And being a good client means you’re well-funded because you have to run often enough, and you have to pay your bills on time.

So, that’s one issue. Then the next issue is you have to be a personality fit; you have to be able to work with these people. This is your baby. This is like sending your kid to daycare.

Spencer: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Steiner Pool: Well, and are you really willing to sacrifice anything like you really have to know sort of your truth and what you’re just not going to cave on. And if you’re sitting across the table with someone entertaining this kind of relationship where they’re nurturing, and cultivating, and driving your product into market, and you don’t have a great feeling, and you’re not really communicating well, (remember, I’m a New Yorker) then that’s not good. It’s ultimately never going to work. Because you have to be respectful of who the other people are. This is who they are, right? This is their business; they need to be successful too. I’m not going to change them. And they have to respect me for who I am. As long as I’m not being a crazy lunatic and disrespectful, then pretty much, you know, we have to be able to meet the middle.

So where we are now: They’re New Yorkers, which is helpful. They know this business. I mean, these guys are third generation, they’re phenomenal. And they love the product. And they believe in me, and they believe in the potential of what we can be. And that makes it a good fit.

Spencer: Was it hard? I mean, you again, you’re in a little bit of a unique position because of the flour. It always comes back to the flour, doesn’t it?

So, you have the blender, and then you have the contract manufacturer? How do you bring the two of them together? And how did that factor into finding a good contract manufacturer?

Steiner Pool: So, rolling back to our previous conversation about defensible: Our flour’s in a black box.— The two shall never meet. From the very inception of the company, the strategy was that the blender and the co-man would never work together and would never know each other and would never be in the same facility.

And so, we order flour — obviously pounds and pounds of flour — and that is shipped to our co-man. And those two will never meet. So, as far as our co-manufacturer’s concerned, it’s like ordering butter. You know, they order the flour, they make our products. And they always want the recipe, but they’ll never get it. 

Spencer: As far as the co-man is concerned, it’s just another third-party vendor.

Steiner Pool: Right. So it just calls for flour, you know, or whatever it is. But you’re right.

Spencer: Okay. That’s really interesting because that co-man and brand relationship, that you give them your formula, and the most important part of your formula is just another ingredient. Like, then you’re managing almost two different companies.

Steiner Pool: Yes, I mean, for sure. But again, remember, it is also a retail product for us. So, it’s a little bit nuanced in that regard. That’s how much I believe in the unique nature of our flour. That’s how critical it is that it remains a secret. It is our Coca-Cola.

And there have been times where, you know, we’ve talked about making it two separate companies. I don’t think that’s fair to our investors. I think they’re investing and believing in, of course me, but in the flour and what it can make, and you know, therefore, it’s one company. That’s how I manage the supply chain.

Spencer: That’s interesting. Like, I’ve never experienced another product or brand like that.

Okay, so I’m going change the subject. And I’m going ask a really rudimentary question. Gluten-free bread is so hard to produce and make it tasty and shelf stable. Relative to something like bread, to manufacture coffee cake, is it hard?

Steiner Pool: Yeah, I mean, it’s cake. Right? So, forget the gluten-free for a minute.

How many cakes do you know in the market that are fresh frozen, that you take home and defrost and eat? Not pie. Pie shells, you can get pie shells, right? I mean, a cookie sandwich, you could sort of argue is a baked good on the outside. I guess muffins maybe. I don’t know if people buy frozen muffins and take them home. I’ve never noticed that. Pizza, but you have to bake it.

It’s really hard. It’s really hard to do. But come back to our three legs of our stool: recipe, methodology and ingredients. If those three things come together, and you freeze it immediately, you will preserve the moisture level. And you can reconstitute it in the microwave when you nuke it. You can’t put it in a toaster. It’s not a piece of bread. You can’t put it in an oven. It’s already baked.

That fresh-frozen concept and wrapping it immediately is a key component to our success. There aren’t a lot of people doing it. I mean, go to the grocery store after our conversation and tell me how many fresh frozen cakes, that are made with real ingredients, okay that’s key — we don’t put anything in the product; there’s no conditioners; there’s no additives; there’s no preservatives; there’s no imitation flavors, nothing — tell me what you find. I don’t think you’re going to find a lot. 

Spencer: It’s like a research project. 

Steiner Pool: It is. I’d challenge you.

So then layer in the gluten-free. So, listen, we never would have launched the company if Nancy hadn’t successfully made a cake that was moist that you didn’t know was gluten-free, right?

You probably know a lot of the complaints about gluten-free: It’s gritty. It has an aftertaste. It sticks in my teeth. It has no taste. It’s you know, as hard as cardboard. It’s sawdust. I mean, all of those things, right? I we’ve all heard them, and many people have experienced them. Our cake doesn’t have those things. And it’s because it’s a real recipe.

And my grandfather didn’t know anything about gluten-free and he probably would have told us all to get out of his kitchen if we even started in with that.

He was a tall, skinny German Jew who did not want to hear about gluten-free, I can assure you. And his recipe is the exact recipe we use, save for the flour. We didn’t change anything.

And so, one of the other things I learned, actually a couple of years ago, unsalted butter now has natural flavors in it, which are a combination of several preservatives because they wanted to extend the shelf life of unsalted butter.

We used to use unsalted butter before this happened. When they made this change, it was changing the texture of the cakes. I went back to my sour cream lesson, right? I was like, “What is going on? I don’t understand. Suddenly this is different.”

It was the butter. So, we rebalanced the salt in the recipe and changed to salted butter, which has no preservatives or additives. And, of course, drew back the salt in the base recipe. So we, you know, had the same amount of salt.

And that can happen to you on the fly. Like imagine you’re producing, producing, producing, and then all of a sudden, a basic ingredient that everybody uses is changed across the board.

Spencer: And this kind of calls back to the very first episode, the first conversation that we had. The thing about baking is, you don’t know, until it’s finished, that it’s changed.

Steiner Pool: Yeah. And now you have hundreds of coffee cakes, but you don’t really — A: It’s a food safety issue because the label doesn’t account for the surprise natural flavors that suddenly appeared in your product — and B: Now I have hundreds of coffee cakes.

Spencer: And then that goes against the zero waste.

Steiner Pool: And this ties back to the food safety conversation we had. Like these are really critical nuances. And in food, it’s just, you know, people are eating this. Like, it’s really critical that you understand each component as you’re moving through your process every day.

Spencer: I mean, gluten-free is so hard. And it’s far more complicated.

Steiner Pool: It is, and the way that my mom, you know, one of the things about her flour formula is how well it absorbs fat. And that’s what drives the moisture.

Again, I think this is the scientist in the back of her head, even though she might not have articulated it as like a chemistry experiment, ‘I think this is what’s going on,’ right? She’s watching this happen, and the key issue is you don’t want it to be dry.

So how are you going to overcome that? And the other thing that she did really well, which is interesting — so I mentioned those things like grit sticking in your teeth, dryness, those particular attributes — she was tinkering against them, if you will.

So, she was in the kitchen saying, ‘Well, if this is sticky, what’s the thing that keeps making it sticky?’ She was kind of trying to deconstruct the negative attributes so that she could re-engineer to a positive outcome. But you know, it took her 35 years; I could never do that.

But now we have a flour that performs and behaves with ingredients that people have in their kitchens because it came from someone’s kitchen, you know, not from a chemistry set.

Spencer: Right, yeah. Okay, so, next week, we’re going to get into this a little more with the gluten-free, like you’re leaning into it now, but sort of touting that gluten-free is secondary to the taste and quality.

So many little things had to come together. What is it that makes this product so special? How do the ingredients play nicely together in order to be machinable and still be the same coffee cake that you made with your mom in her kitchen that your grandfather made in his kitchen? How do you maintain it?

Steiner Pool: So, another principle is, I actually learned this from my dad: Keep it simple. When that is an anchor point, you look at your ingredients with that in mind. And you don’t want to have a lot of ingredients, quite frankly. Gingersnaps are interesting. So, the gingersnaps —  12 ingredients in the gingersnaps — that’s a lot, in my opinion. Every one of them has to be right.

Whereas brownies have six ingredients; easier to control. I do, first and foremost, want the recipes to be very simple, which also allows us to embrace our promise of a clean label. The less you put in it, the less issues you have. That influences how the ingredients work together.

One of the things I learned when you mix the butter and sugar— and I tell people who are baking at home to do this — when you mix the butter and sugar together first, the sugar is incorporating with the fat in the butter which is going to give you more moisture.

The other thing with our flour, unlike conventional flour, you can really beat the crap out of this flour. You almost can’t over-mix the flour. When you mix something furiously, you’re introducing air over the time that you’re mixing it, so that can drive dryness in a product or can make something sticky and not come out of pans or different things that can happen.

But our flour can take it. And it just keeps absorbing the moisture. So the coffee cakes in particular — because we have two great sources of fat in the coffee cakes — for moisture we have the sour cream and the butter, we can really drive the moisture level up, which people love.

So those ingredients come together really nicely, and we always use the flour last. It’s the last thing to go in the mixer. So, everything else incorporates, and then the flour goes in. And it just sucks all of that up really well. And that’s, you know, a really important part of the process. When we get to talk about some of the line extensions we’ll have in the future, the way that the flour behaves and interacts with the flavors and other things that go in the recipes, it’s a critical part of why they’re so delicious. And in some cases, people would argue, better than the conventional counterpart.

Spencer: Wow, awesome. That’s so interesting. It’s so interesting. It’s fascinating.

Steiner Pool: Even though I hate baking, and I think I’ve said that several times, I’m still curious, or I still want to know how does this work? And I care about each step of the process. So even if I don’t physically like doing it, I am intrigued by the whole thing, so that helps mitigate the distaste for the baking part.

Spencer: I think you’re really good at engineering. And I think you have a bit of Nanci’s scientific mind.

Steiner Pool: Maybe, or maybe it’s just my unwillingness to accept no.

Spencer: You have her stubbornness. 

Steiner Pool: Now, don’t tell me it can’t be done, because I’m just going to go do it.

Spencer: I love it. I love it.

Okay, so that is going to wrap up this week’s conversation, Jennifer. We’re going to stay on the theme of gluten-free but look at it from a marketing standpoint. And I want to dive back into Mondelez and their advice to lean into it, but I have seen this trend toward making the gluten-free secondary. And it’s a hard balance to say, ‘This is gluten-free, but don’t worry about that.’ So, I think we’re going to have another interesting conversation next week.

Steiner Pool: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it.

Spencer: Thanks again, Jennifer. You are so fun to talk to. Have a great day.

Steiner Pool: You too!