With the right partner by your side – a partner who is head-over-heels for flavorful food, craves unique and delicious ideas, and wants to push creative boundaries – you can achieve culinary innovation. The perfect partner will foster kitchen collaboration, helping you develop unique custom flavors for sauces, dressings, dips, and drizzles that reflect and expand on your brand’s narrative. If such a partner sounds too good to be true, think again. The skilled culinologists at Giraffe Foods can guide you from collaboration to customization to culinary innovation. In fact, it’s our specialty!
Unlike some other food manufacturers, who take shortcuts and force your idea through a sieve until it better fits with their existing products, the talented team at Giraffe Foods strives for a genuine partnership. We will listen to your unique requirements and concerns, and use them to craft a custom product that’s not only delicious but also meets your demands when it comes to flavor, budget, methodology, and more. We love to challenge ourselves, so please give us the chance to blow you away with bold, unexpected flavor combinations!
Another benefit of partnering with Giraffe Foods? As an end-to-end custom food solution partner, we understand the considerations that come along with packaging. Unlike basic food manufacturers, we can work with you to develop the perfect packaging for your product, keeping product safety, product quality, and functionality in mind. With our expert insights, you’ll enjoy a final product that far exceeds your customers’ expectations.
How do we do it? Let’s dig into the process.
How We Foster Culinary Innovation
Live Taste-Testing Sessions
Once you’ve gathered some inspiration, grab a front-row seat to culinary innovation at a live taste-testing session. Our masterful culinologists will strategize which of the five basic taste sensations – sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter – should be incorporated into your custom sauce to achieve your specific goals. We will also discuss factors like aroma, color, consistency, ingredients, texture, viscosity, and pungency, as well as formatting solutions like sous vide, chilled, refrigerated, and frozen.
At this collaborative session, you can specify your goals for the product as well as any limitations. What are your aims regarding caloric value and fat content? Would you like the product to be plant-based or gluten-free? Provide us with as many details as possible so we can craft a sauce that both delights your tastebuds and satisfies all your flavor customization goals. Based on the ideas shared during this session, our knowledgeable chefs will conduct a culinary demonstration with tailor-made samples to further nail down your vision. This immediate flavor analysis will be followed by a discussion to ensure that we’re are on the same page and can move forward with confidence.
Expert Insights & Trends
We’re food enthusiasts, which means we’re always keeping an eye on the culinary landscape. By sharing flavor trends and consumer behavior insights, we can help you explore how current trends might align with your brand’s personal goals. We can also uncover opportunities for growth, pinpointing “white space” you can tap into and leverage.
For example, floral flavors are having a moment this spring, from hibiscus and rose to lavender, elderflower, and cherry blossom. Keep them on your radar if you’re seeking warm-weather innovations. Looking ahead to autumn, while pumpkin spice is still a mainstay, try green apple or blood orange for a fresher take on fall. You could also spice up your menu with “scary hot” or sweet-and-spicy flavor profiles. (Dataessential 2023) Let our food explorers guide you through the top trending foods and flavors.
Our culinary team can also help you discover the flavor landscape of a specific category. If you want a unique take on a hot sauce, how about Sweet Thai Honey? To branch out beyond your typical ranch/garlic sauce, you could try Honey Dill Dip, Cactus Dip, or Sriracha Ranch. Our team can provide a competitive analysis so you can peruse the possibilities.
Additionally, to maximize volumes and value, Giraffe Foods will brainstorm multiple applications for your custom products. Get the most out of those must-have summer flavors on your upcoming LTO menu. Instead of developing a Mango Serrano Sauce solely to drizzle on pizza, you could use it as a dipping sauce for a spicy chicken sandwich, a syrup for a sausage breakfast biscuit, or a sweet-heat sauce swirled into French vanilla ice cream. Or, speaking of sauces that will satisfy your customers’ sweet tooth, if you want to add a Salted Caramel Sauce to your menu as a dip for chocolate-covered fruit and pretzels, think about how you could use it through every season: as a drizzle for apple turnovers in autumn, as a glaze for mini cinnamon rolls in winter, and as the topping for raspberry cheesecake bites in spring. Let’s explore the possibilities!
Sound Decision Making
Use our team as your sounding board when playing around with fresh, funky, and out-of-the-box ideas. Through strategic discussions with our team leads – regulatory, R&D, culinary, business, and marketing – you’ll feel confident that you’re making sound decisions based on our years of industry experience. For example, we’ve developed salad dressings for customers using reduced oil and egg to minimize cost while also recommending functional “clean label” ingredients to prevent a loss in quality. When you partner with Giraffe Foods, our team will help you consider commodity ingredient pricing trends to direct product development and prepare for future launches.
Our culinary experts can assist with a variety of common business issues:
- Rising Costs: Over half of businesses currently list inflation as one of their top concerns. When you collaborate with Giraffe Foods, our experts understand how rising costs impact the end consumer purchasing power. Through culinary innovation, we can help you mitigate costs with flexible, easily available ingredients or work together in much advance of your product launch to device a costing that suits both the partners.
- The Challenge of Retaining Quality Staff: Finding and retaining high-quality, skilled labor is an on-going bottleneck, with 45% of operators currently identifying it as one of their top issues (Emergence Report, Kinetic 12, 2022). Our culinary innovation and manufacturing capacity can assist you in resolving your back-of-house issues, simplifying your prep work with ready-to-use sauces and condiments and helping your chefs move faster in the kitchen.
- Supply Chain Disruptions: Though supply chain consistency has improved generally, it’s still a top concern for many businesses. It ranked #4 overall when business operators were asked to name their top business concerns at the moment (Emergence Report, Kinetic 12, 2022). Our team tackles these issues head-on by maintaining an inventory of key items, over-communicating when issues arise, seeking out readily available alternatives, and pre-approving back-ups that meet the same standards.
The Giraffe Foods culinary team is ready to help you craft custom sauces, dressings, dips, drizzles, and marinades that will tempt consumers’ tastebuds while also meeting your functional and financial requirements. We’re ready to stir up a bowl of unbridled creativity. What sort of culinary innovation will we curate for you? To find out, contact our talented account managers today.