Creating Craveable Proteins

In 2018, Charles Hayes joined Deli Star Corp. as vice president of culinary innovation after being impressed by the company’s sous vide innovations, including the ability to pasteurize proteins. The company’s sous vide products are fresh, not frozen, with a shelf-life between 100 to 160 days. Food Technology talked to him about how sous vide, in general, and Deli Star, specifically, are adjusting to the way people eat.

Can you walk me through what’s involved in making a custom formulation?

On a typical visit, I will go in and meet with the chef or the food scientists and research development team and talk about what they’re working on. Say they are working on a beef bourguignon that’s going to go into a tray, and then it has a sleeve on it, and it goes into a cabinet. You see those meals all over the place. There are a lot of meals in trays these days. I’ll say, “Okay, so what is it that you’re looking for? What’s your flavor profile? How are you making it?” We’ll work on it together to create a gold-standard product.

What happens next?

We’ll see how it works in a commercial environment. If we get past that first gate, we’ll go back to our facility in St. Louis and commercialize it with ingredients that are commercially viable. From there, they’ll bring that back to their operation, meet with their leadership team and marketing department or end-consumers. And if the response is good, then we produce pilot products so they can do further testing for taste, texture, flavor, and their own shelf-life study. Then after that, it’s on to the production facility where we produce 100,000s of pounds of product.

How long does that typically take?

Typically 18–24 weeks, sometimes much faster. If we are tweaking something we already have in our portfolio, it can be much quicker.

Have you seen any shifts as more people work remotely, perhaps taking lunch into the office less often?

Actually, we’ve seen quite an increase in the grab-and-go sandwich market. Through the pandemic, our deli production was huge. We were working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the Feeding America program, part of the supply chain supporting that program. And we have not seen that taper off at all. In fact, I was a little bit amazed when I first joined the company about how many sandwich makers and salad makers there are in the nation.

Has interest in plant-based diets affected your portfolio?

We ran at that really hard. We developed a whole line of plant-based turkey, plant-based deli log, plant-based chicken shreds, and plant-based beef shreds and things like that. But you know, we never saw it take off. Two years ago it was a major focus, but we have seen it taper off drastically.

Why do you think that is?

We’ve worked with large companies that made that decision that the turnover for the product isn’t there. There’s not enough room on their grocery shelves to slide it in. So, those products just went away.

What are the challenges you hear most from your customers?

Labor. No. 1 is labor. Plant workers, yes, and also within R&D there are not enough food scientists and research chefs to go around.

What do you wish your customers were thinking about more often?

We look at trends a lot. When we are looking at how people are voting with their money, a lot of it is based around sustainability. We try to focus keenly on that. Traditional sous vide processing is done in a water bath. We process under steam, and that uses less water, much less water. We’re not keeping all that water at a constant temperature. That’s much, much better for the environment.ft