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In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, host Daniel Scharff sits down with Rebecca Urciuolo, a formulator with over 23 years of food and beverage experience at BevSource (FB Solutions Group), to dig into one of the most exciting and most misunderstood parts of building a CPG brand: working with a formulator to bring your product to life. From how to write a great project brief to what happens when things go sideways at the co-manufacturer, Rebecca shares hard-won lessons and insider knowledge that every founder — at any stage — needs to hear.
Rebecca opens with a clear message: the best founders are partners, not passengers. They come with a firm goal in mind, stay present through the iteration process, and actively want to learn — because understanding what you don't know will inevitably make your product better. Daniel reflects on his own experience formulating a beverage during the early pandemic days, calling it one of the most joyful parts of his CPG career.
The conversation covers the most common early-stage mistakes founders make when approaching a formulator: coming in too vague, being too rigid, or not understanding the regulatory and packaging constraints that shape what's actually possible. Rebecca explains how to write a strong project brief, why reference products are half the job, and how the tasting and feedback process works — including the vocabulary founders need to give useful, actionable notes.
They also get into the nuances that make beverage formulation uniquely complex: the chicken-and-egg relationship between formulation and co-manufacturer selection, how packaging constraints shape your formula, what to do when an ingredient gets discontinued, and how your product will continue to evolve on shelf over its entire life. Rebecca walks through the gold standard process at first production, what to watch for at the co-man, and how to think about COGS and ingredient exposure from the very beginning.
Whether you're developing your first SKU, scaling to a co-manufacturer, or trying to understand why your formula tastes different six months in, this episode gives you the practical framework you didn't know you needed.
Listen in as they discuss:
- Why your project brief is the single most important thing you can bring to a formulator — and what it needs to include
- How reference products and flavor inspiration cut feedback cycles and unlock a formulator's creativity
- The vocabulary of tasting: body, brix, mouthfeel, and why learning to give articulate feedback changes everything
- Why packaging and co-manufacturer selection can't be decoupled from formulation — and how to think about the chicken-and-egg problem
- What happens at the first production run: the gold standard process, what to watch for, and when to bring your formulator on-site
- How your product changes over time on shelf — and how shelf life studies help you understand what you're actually selling at month nine or twelve
- COGS 101: novel ingredients, ingredient exposure, and why "welcome to capitalism" is the honest answer
Episode Links:
Rebecca Urciuolo – Formulator, BevSource (FB Solutions Group)
Website: https://www.bevsource.com
FB Solutions Group (FBSG) is the strategic partner for food & beverage entrepreneurs, providing end-to-end development, production, and sourcing solutions. Through our specialized divisions—BevSource, AlcSource and iTi Tropicals—we offer the operational expertise and infrastructure needed to optimize supply chains and accelerate growth for emerging brands.
FB Solutions Group (FBSG) is the strategic partner for food & beverage entrepreneurs, providing end-to-end development, production, and sourcing solutions. Through our specialized divisions—BevSource, AlcSource and iTi Tropicals—we offer the operational expertise and infrastructure needed to optimize supply chains and accelerate growth for emerging brands.
Don't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com.
Show Links:
- Transcripts of each episode are available on the Transistor platform that hosts our podcast here (click on the episode and toggle to “Transcript” at the top)
- Join the Startup CPG Slack community (35K+ members and growing!)
- Follow @startupcpg
- Visit host Daniel's Linkedin
- Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at podcast@startupcpg.com
- Episode music by Super Fantastics
Creators and Guests
What is The Startup CPG Podcast?
The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.
Rebecca Urciuolo
Help me to help you. Right? I can guide you to certain places, but you gotta have like a firm goal in mind of what you want. We can figure out the details, but I really need like the gist of it. And a lot of it is it's dialogue, it's being present and that treat us more like partners. Right. We do have a lot of folks that come in and they have an idea, but they're very rigid and they have some knowledge gaps and don't really want to listen to things like, well, the FDA says you cannot do this, so we're not going to do that. Right. That's illegal. And they don't want to hear things like that. So we really love folks that understand, they don't know what they don't know. Right.
00:47
Rebecca Urciuolo
And they actively like, want to learn and understand because this will inevitably make their product better.
00:55
Daniel Scharff
Hello and welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. My absolute favorite part of CPG is making the actual product. Working with a formulator to make your idea a real thing that you can taste and drink. It's such a joy. But there are so many learnings you will have along the way for how to get the best out of a formulator. An effective project brief, giving them really articulate feedback on the different product iterations they send you, making sure it's a formula that can scale. There's so much there. Lucky us. On today's podcast we have an incredibly experienced formulator from BevSource. They are an industry leading full service beverage solutions provider. They do this for a living. They do beverage development, production management, packaging, ingredient procurement and so many operational support services. We're so lucky.
01:42
Daniel Scharff
Today we're going deep into the world of working with a formulator like them and all of the learnings to help you do it better. This is a super fun listen, no matter what kind of product you're making. But if you happen to be making a beverage and want to chat with their team, check the show notes for how to contact them. Also, they were kind enough to give us a sample project brief that any of you could use that's linked in the show notes as well. All right. Right, here we go. All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast. I am so excited about today's episode because I have lived this. So today we're talking about best practices, working with a formulator and we have some of the most experienced people out there, BevSource here to talk about it today.
02:27
Daniel Scharff
And the reason that I love this topic so much is because I did this. I got to be the head of a beverage company and go and find a formulator and work with them and learn how to speak their language. And it's like working with a great artist. It was so much fun. I would say maybe the best time I ever had working in this industry was tasting the samples and learning how to give feedback on it. And it's so much fun when you're working with people who have great skills and are committed to working with you on an end product. So I have one of those people here today. So we have Rebecca. First of all, Rebecca, would you mind giving us a little bit of an intro about who you are?
03:05
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Daniel. It's great to meet you. My name is Rebecca Urciuolo. I've been with BevSource for three years, but I have 23 years of experience in the food and beverage industry. My focus has mainly been on functional and carbonated soft drinks, but worked on pretty much everything functional. Waters, sodas, juices, RTD cocktails, even did a small stint in pharma for a while making dietary soft chews. So a little bit of confectionery work too. Worked at a lot of different types of companies ranging from a pre revenue startup all the way to multi billion dollar worldwide conglomerate.
03:41
Daniel Scharff
All right, and so your background is so interesting to me because you have over 20 years of experience cross product development and formulation and commercialization. All of these things that certified food scientists typically have. How do you learn to actually do all of this stuff? Do you have to learn it? Is there a training school for it or you just were much better in science classes than I was. Where do you pick up all these skills to do this kind of work?
04:05
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, so it's actually kind of funny if you talk to a lot of food scientists out there. Very few of us actually study. Like we didn't go to school for food science. People kind of fall in food science. So I actually went to undergraduate for environmental science and I went to school for science because my parents wouldn't pay for college to send me to art school or cooking school. So I had to choose something that was a little bit more wallet friendly. I actually ended up getting a temp job at PepsiCo right after my undergraduate as I was kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my next step. And I thought maybe if I get hooked up with a temp agency, try a couple different jobs, something's going to fit, right?
04:43
Rebecca Urciuolo
And food science is like this really beautiful marriage of like the cooking and the art that I do in my spare Time and like my analytics medical brain and yeah, I fell into it and I have not left and.
04:55
Daniel Scharff
But there are a lot of technical skills required. You need to have a really good understanding of all the ingredients and the processes out there. So do you just get that over time because of the experience that you're building up?
05:06
Rebecca Urciuolo
I mean there are a couple of great schools. Rutgers and Cornell are two of the topmost food science schools in the country if anyone's interested in studying. But it is a very hands on profession. Right. It's like physics. Like there's a theoretical aspect and there's an application aspect. So you can make a paper formula but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to translate into something that tastes good or something that's stable. So so much of it is really that hands on aspect. You just really got to get into the lab, you got to play around, you got to work with stuff. But you also need that foundation, right? So read your chemistry books. No one likes chemistry in high school, but read your chemistry books. That's all food is chemistry. And it's.
05:46
Rebecca Urciuolo
You just, you have this foundation but you gotta build on that by using your hands. You can't do one or the other.
05:52
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I really like hearing that and the analogy also. And I would say actually probably the same is true about business as well. I went to business school. What did we learn there? I don't really even know. I mean not how to actually do business. You learn way more being in a business and doing it every day and making decisions and just doing different jobs at a business. So that makes sense to me. I first learned about Bev Source by the way when I was doing beverage company and this was, were starting very early pandemic and oh, there was a lot going on in the beverage industry in those days. You had things like White Claw coming online and just seltzers were going crazy. I mean everyone was launching Slim can this, Slim can that.
06:36
Daniel Scharff
And so I know you guys have been very busy. I actually got to work with BevSource as well because once were up and running we had a lot of questions and where are you going to go to BevSource? Like who knows more about all of the, I would say intricacies of beverage manufacturing, especially BevSource. And we ended up finding our way to an extremely competent person at BevSource who I think solved a lot of our really specific manufacturing issues. But can you give everybody a primer on BevSource also for people who maybe don't know as much about the different services that you have.
07:09
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah. So BevSource, kind of what it sounds like. We want to be your one stop shop, your one source for all things beverage. So myself and my team, we're dedicated to kind of the upstream, the developments. Right. So we're the people that are going to help you with your formulations, manage your projects and basically get you that formula that goes into your package. But we do so much more than that. We can actually help you procure all the ingredients that you need to make that beverage. That packaging help you with identifying a co packer so you can actually make the beverage and you know, get it on the shelf somewhere.
07:44
Rebecca Urciuolo
We can help you with compliance and regulatory review for alcohol and even manage your operations if you don't have a team that can dedicate themselves to, you know, planning productions, ordering ingredients and actually working with the co packers. So pretty much the only thing we don't do as outside services is marketing and distribution. But we can help you find that person too, even if it's not us.
08:06
Daniel Scharff
That's pretty amazing. So one stop shop everything, beverage making, scaling your product and especially I don't think it's the main thing that you guys do, but oh my gosh, there are some smart people there who can help solve operational things. There's a guy there, his name is Bob Williams. Bob is like the Oracle. I actually was just talking to a brand on the phone today that called me in a panic. Like I'm having these issues with my product quality. This is happening. I'm like, if you can get on the phone with Bob the Oracle, then this is like the most experienced dude out there. So anyways, you guys have a very deep bench there.
08:42
Daniel Scharff
So you know, obviously what I wanted to talk to you about today was this process of working with a formulator because it's such a special thing to get to do. And I think understanding the process and knowing how to work well with a formulator can make all of the difference. And I hope everybody who's doing CPG and getting to formulate with people really enjoys it because it's like as fun as it gets for this thing that's in your head to get to come to life and have it be even better than you ever dreamed it could because of the skills that a formulator has. So let's go through it though. Let's give everyone all the insider info on how to actually work with a formulator and get the most out of them and themselves in the process.
09:21
Daniel Scharff
So starting with the basics, when should I talk to a formulator because I think anybody who has an idea is going to be very excited about it. Maybe they just have this really vague idea. Should they reach out to the formulator then, or should they try to get a little bit further along and refine their idea? Like, what do you need to have ready when you're reaching out to somebody?
09:42
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, I mean, we get folks all over the place. We get folks calling up saying, hey, I've got an idea and I don't know what to do. You do it for me. It's not the best way to approach things. And we have people who come with 40 page decks of business plans and we're like, wow, that's amazing. Let's talk. But there are some fundamental things we really need to understand about your product. And a lot of folks don't know. There's so many aspects of the beverage industry, right? It's not like I said, as we food scientists, you know, as we fall into it, no one grows up thinking, man, I want to make cereal. Like, I want to know how to make cereal for a living. Right? No one thinks about what's on the shelf.
10:17
Rebecca Urciuolo
But what we really kind of need to understand is how many details can you give us, right? Like, we want to know, what is your product, what's the identity of your product? Are you looking to do, you know, an RTD cocktail? Are you looking to make a functional mushroom beverage? That helps us out a lot things people don't think about. Nutrition Facts Panel versus Supplement Facts Panel. It helps us determine what kind of compliance your beverage needs to fall under. We need to kind of understand the type of package you're using, and that helps us understand any sort of processing for food safety down the line. Great.
10:51
Rebecca Urciuolo
To understand if you have a price point you're trying to work at, if you have any sort of marketing and distribution plan, like having that knowledge from the founder tells us that you've thought about this and you're really serious about it. Right? It's not just you kind of kicking around an idea in your head. You're like, you've got the momentum and you want to go.
11:11
Daniel Scharff
So I imagine you guys have such a strong skill set and the research and all of these different services. I imagine you actually can work with somebody, let's say it's like a celebrity and they're like, I want to have a beverage. Can you make me a beverage? Like, probably you can actually guide them through all of that stuff as well. Like, yeah, here's some ideas, here's Some concepts.
11:27
Rebecca Urciuolo
It just makes my job a little harder, that's all.
11:30
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, but then if you're not that person, hopefully, like, more people, I think come with a specific idea, and I think this is a good place to be working with you guys. But especially if anyone goes and works with, let's say, like a freelance product developer, like, if they're on a really scrappy budget or whatever, I think the more info you can give somebody like that who then doesn't even have access to all of the capabilities that BevSource would have. I like where you're going. And when I did this, we actually had a product brief to send over to the formulator. And it's all of the things that you mentioned, but it also was very steeped in our own research. So I think it started with.
12:04
Daniel Scharff
We had an idea of what we wanted to do, but we had done a lot of store visits and we understood what was the dominant packaging on shelf, what did the competitors look like, what was the type of can, let's say, and what was the size of can that people are selling in mainly, and what are the prominent flavors there in the category? And understanding that, but then quickly moving to, like, what are we trying to do? What are the claims we're trying to make? Especially things like, do you want this to be non gmo? Do you want it to be organic? Is that important to your overall product and the messaging that you're going to have here. Do you want to avoid certain kinds of sweeteners? Do you want to avoid certain kinds of flavors? All of that stuff.
12:44
Daniel Scharff
I feel like it was so good for us to have it really laid out specifically before we even got into the kind of flavor discussion with a formulator. And then when it comes to flavor, I think you can say, like, hey, I'd like a product that's like this, and here are all the characteristics. Or you can also have a reference product.
13:02
Rebecca Urciuolo
We love reference products. You have a kitchen recipe, or even if you can tell me, hey, man, I love this flavor of white claw, that really is half the job. I'm serious. Like, just understanding what your expectations of the flavor are is half our job.
13:16
Daniel Scharff
It really, to me, it struck me that the process was a lot like working with an artist in general. Of, like, you can work with a painter, they have so many skills. But if you can give them your Pinterest and the mood board, and here's what I'm looking for, and here are the things that can and can't have, it's going to cut down the feedback cycles a lot. And like, or anyone who works with a graphic designer, like a logo designer, any of that stuff, like, they love for you to give them as much inspiration and input as possible. It really then also helps them be very creative, but within this frame that you've given them. And I think it helps you get to something much faster. So.
13:51
Daniel Scharff
But you typically would like, see this in a formal brief document or you're okay with it just being a big bullet point list of wish list stuff.
13:59
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah. So the way our process works is you don't start talking to the formulator straight away. You talk to the sales team first as an intake process, and they're going to ask you a few questions and present then us in the development team with this brief that we review and we'll red flag anything that might kind of not fit together, like if there's a specific thermal process that doesn't match the package. Well, we'll kind of flag that. If we're missing any crucial information, we'll have the sales team kind of go back and get that. If we got really big gaps, we'll have the sales team just put us on the phone with the founder and like, let's talk it out. Right. Sometimes you just need to ask questions in a different way to get the right answer.
14:39
Rebecca Urciuolo
And once you do start working with the formulator, we make a brief for the project. So, like, we'll have a kickoff call and we're going to ask you a million and one questions, probably some you've already answered with the sales team. But things can change from day to day. Right. So we want to make sure we're understanding you as well as possible, getting as many details as possible. And the formulators, having been doing this for so long, we can kind of tease out what you mean. Like, if you don't quite have the words, like, we don't expect anyone to have the technical words to talk to us. Right. But we understand what you're trying to say and that's part of that conversation. And so we'll make that brief, then that gets signed by the founder and that becomes our foundation.
15:19
Rebecca Urciuolo
Now, like, if the founder has a brief, that's wonderful because again, to us, that says you've really thought about this, like, you put some work into this and you're serious about it. And yet we love folks that are really part of the conversation more than just kind of help me get this energy drink, like, onto the shelves.
15:37
Daniel Scharff
I like your point about the language, the nomenclature, and it's so helpful. Once you start learning some of that. Because I would say at the beginning of this journey, I feel like I have a good palate. I can taste a lot of things. I know what I like, what I don't like, which is a good place to start. It would be very hard for me to describe specific things that I liked or didn't like about a beverage or even really know. And as I got into the tasting process, then I learned vocabulary. Like body, like the body of a drink. The bitterness, the tartness, you know, because we had, like, tasting forms we would use, and it would really guide you through just trying to understand, like, okay, I. I like this one better than that one. But why?
16:13
Daniel Scharff
Okay, is it the carbonation level? Like, oh, actually, yeah, I like this carbonation better than that other one. Or is it, like, the sweet verse tart balance that I like? You know, just learning a lot of the different components helps you, I think, also then give feedback along the way. Right. And one thing that really surprised me also was just how many different variations there can be of, let's say, a flavor or like, hey, I want mint. Like, what kind? Like, you know, mint. Okay, what kind of mint do you want, though? Because there are 50 different kinds out there, and they all taste really different, actually. And I think until you taste the thing that is going to be your drink, you don't know why it's so important to you. And then you try it, and that's.
16:57
Rebecca Urciuolo
Why we love reference samples, right? Mint's a great example. Is it a peppermint? Is it a spearmint? Is it a wintergreen? Right? So if you can, like. If you tell me you like root beer, I go, oh, you like wintergreen, right? But if you tell me you like a certain type of gum, it's probably a peppermint or a spearmint, right? So, yeah, that's what I mean. Like, anything. Anything that can ground us and kind of set a baseline is just incredibly helpful for us to understand what you're looking for. And then also how there's probably gonna be more than one flavor, right? And then how we kind of, like, balance those flavors together.
17:30
Daniel Scharff
So let's say I am coming to you with a product. I'm like, hey, I want to do a new sports drink. And I want it to be like Gatorade, lemon, lime, but I want it to be less sweet, and I want a little more body in the flavor. Stuff like that. What is your actual process? Like, at that point? Are you gonna go out and, I mean, I know you've had it. But are you going to go like, okay, I'm going to go and get that and I'm going to taste it. And because Rebecca has so much experience, like, you actually cannot just from taste identify a lot of the stuff that are components of it, probably.
18:03
Daniel Scharff
And then, like, because you have in your head your whole tool set out there of all the things that you can use, and you're just going to start coming up with ways that you could do what I'm asking, or how does that process actually work?
18:14
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah. Like, if we've got a reference sample, again, that makes it so much easier because there's an ingredient statement on that reference sample. So that gives us 95% of what we need to know about that beverage. Right. For something like a reduction of sugar, it kind of seems simple. Like when. When you think about it, oh, I'll just take out some sugar and, like, I'll put in a little bit of stevia or something. But like you said, you want to keep that body. Right. Sugar has a functional role to play besides just being sweets. Right. So how do you take away that sugar? You reduce what's called the Brix, which is the amount of solids in the beverage. That brix is going to help with the body. How do you get those solids back in there without adding sugar? Right.
18:56
Rebecca Urciuolo
And that's kind of where the toolbox comes in of the knowledge of, do we add a bulking agent like erythritol, which will help with sweetness and with body, but it'll keep your calories low? Do we add some fiber or something in there to help kind of absorb the water and thicken everything up to help that Gatorade is a bit of a sliminess with the sugar in all of the electrolytes and that people kind of come to expect that. Right. So how do we get that tongue coating? Right. And that coating in the back of your throat when we take the sugar and some of the other things out?
19:26
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. There's so many different dimensions that you would want to evaluate a beverage on, including that kind of mouth feel and like, oh, where is the sweetness? Is the back of your tongue? Is it the roof of your mouth? Like, so many different ways to do this. So you have worked with so many different people at this point on developing their dream. Right. You must have some people that you just absolutely love working with, like, even more than others because they know how to get the best out of you. Right. Or they work the best with you. What are some of the things that they're doing to really make that project sing.
19:57
Rebecca Urciuolo
First off, like, they have their idea fleshed out. Like I said, I, like, help me to help you, right? I can kind of guide you to certain places, but you gotta have like a firm goal in mind of what you want. We can figure out the details, but I really need like the gist of it. And a lot of it is, it's dialogue, it's being present folks. You know, we go through this iteration process of tasting the different samples and some folks just kind of disappear into the background. They send you an email a couple days later and they're like, oh, yeah, want these tweaks? Or this is good, let's move forward.
20:28
Rebecca Urciuolo
But the folks that'll like, get on the phone with you and like, do that virtual tasting or come on site and work with you and give you that like real honest back and forth feedback. Like, that's really amazing, you know, to kind of help us and that treat us more like partners, right? We do have a lot of folks that come in and they have an idea, but they're very rigid and they have some knowledge gaps and don't really want to listen to things like, well, the FDA says you cannot do this, so we're not going to do that. That. Right. That's illegal. And they don't want to hear things like that. So we really love folks that understand. They don't know what they don't know. Right. And they actively, like, want to learn and understand because this will inevitably make their product better.
21:10
Rebecca Urciuolo
So, you know, we, like I said, we want a true partner. We want someone who goes on that journey with us, who can really help us kind of paint that picture.
21:17
Daniel Scharff
I wonder, Rebecca, just because you've done this so much, I'm curious if you can think of an example of a time that you just like really figured something out for a brand that you're really proud of. Like, oh, it just wasn't working and they just weren't happy with the way the flavor was sitting or just you were having trouble with one of the ingredients or you couldn't get it to the nutritional profile they were looking for. And then you just figured it out somehow together. Whether it was a different kind of flavor that you figured out how to source or you figured out like maybe it wasn't even they were telling you they didn't like the sweetness, but it was actually the body and you figured out how to like solve that for them. Do you have an example like that?
21:56
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, actually we had a project last year, I was working on it Was a company who they were working not in the food and beverage industry, but they had a package that they wanted to bring into the beverage industry. Right. So it could be used in personal care, basically. And they were like, can we bring this into the beverage industry? Like, it's going to help cut down on plastic and like all sorts of like really cool environmental things. But it's. That's just not what it's designed to do. So it was really cool to be able to work with that novel package. And like they were hoping to do some sort of sports drink. And so it's like, all right, well what are the constraints of the package? One of them was viscosity, like the literal thickness of the beverage. Right.
22:38
Rebecca Urciuolo
Because of the way the closure was on the pack, it would leak if the beverage wasn't at a certain viscosity. So there were a lot of tools that we kind of had to work with, like how do we raise the viscosity of that beverage to make sure it wouldn't leak. So that was the really fun project that was with BevSource. My biggest example is actually outside of BevSource. I worked for a pre revenue startup a number of years ago and they had some technology that they were trying to marry with beverage, but they were a technology company, not a beverage company. So they brought me in and figured out a way we did these multi serving functional beverage concentrates and no one had any idea about solubility and food safety and things like that.
23:18
Rebecca Urciuolo
It's like, how do we cram all of this stuff into a tiny little package, make it taste good and make it safe and make it work with this technology. And that was definitely the biggest challenge I faced in my career. The most frustrating challenge I faced in my career. But I did it and we launched and it was a pretty cool journey.
23:36
Daniel Scharff
That's amazing. And from what I can tell, people who are formulators or ops people, they like solving problems that are interesting. I was just talking to a friend of mine.
23:45
Rebecca Urciuolo
That's what R and D is all about. Yeah, Yeah.
23:48
Daniel Scharff
A friend of mine who's just looking at a new job and he was like, this is exciting to me because no one's ever done this before. And it's gonna be a lot of work. And it'll be so interesting to figure out how to put these new things together. These new machines that have never done this, for example. I mean, it's exciting. That sounds really exciting. So Rebecca, you have this deep skill set, decades of experience putting together these kind of ingredients. I feel like any beverage company would be incredibly fortunate to get to work with you. Can you tell me a little bit about then? What would you actually recommend to them when they are looking formulators? So let's say, you know, BevSource obviously is a great option for beverage companies looking to formulate, but there are lots of product categories out there.
24:29
Daniel Scharff
So what advice would you have for brands as they are evaluating formulators, regardless of what product category they're in, to make sure they're finding the right partner?
24:40
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah. So first and foremost I want to put this out there. This is not cheap. You do need to have a little bit of money in your wallet to do this. How much you can spare will partly depend upon how far you can go. Right. So as you're working with formulators, yeah, there are different types. Like you mentioned, there are some freelancers out there who will probably be a little bit more wallet friendly for a startup who's just kind of scraping things together or maybe needs to do things piecemeal, you know, as they figure out where funding is coming from. There are plenty of reputable companies out there that only do formulations. You're still going to get a fantastic formula and fantastic service, but that's only one step. Right. You've got some full service companies like us. Right.
25:20
Rebecca Urciuolo
So formulation, you know, is only one step. It's how do you get your ingredients, how do you get your packaging, how do you get your co packers and other things like that. So yeah, I think it really depends on what you can do at the moment. What's going to be the best fit for you. And before you sign up for anything, definitely talk about what those deliverables are that you're getting. Right. There are formulators out there who will keep the formula and own the formula even though they're making it for you. So that's something, you know, very important to talk about. Like if you're going to have a formula for your brands, I mean, I would want to own that. Right. That's my baby. So just make sure that you're going to get what you need and what you want out of them.
25:59
Rebecca Urciuolo
Set those expectations like from the get go.
26:02
Daniel Scharff
I think that's a really good overview. So that's the reality of some brands will have to be very scrappy. Maybe it's somebody doing it as a side hustle and they have a few thousand bucks saved up to get this product to market and they're not, they don't have your skill set. And so there are so many great freelancers out There who are eager to work with you. And we really appreciate BevSource and FB solutions because you guys partner with us on this incredible database that were able to build. It's the first ever database of all the product developers out there. We wanted everyone to have access to you guys and all the other options as well to make sure that people can find the right partner that really makes sense for them, whether they have.
26:39
Daniel Scharff
I hope everybody has budget to do all the things that they want to do. But BevSource, which is a full service partner that you can have that has all these capabilities, obviously has a little bit of a cost profile than somebody who maybe doesn't have that overhead and is just kind of a freelancer somewhere. So we really appreciate your guys help with that. And I mean, just being honest, like I think BevSource was too busy to work with me back in the pandemic days because we reached out and they're like, you have no idea what's going on right now in the beverage world. To you there's like, we can work with you in six months. I was like, well, my whole world's gonna change by then. So that it was like my dream to get to work with you guys.
27:13
Daniel Scharff
And I wasn't able to. And later on I probably should have just waited because it would have. I think we would have really appreciated that full service help actually in retrospect. So by the way, like, what is the actual process like to get to work with you guys? Like is it. How are you going to value? Because I know like there are some projects that won't make sense for you guys the same way it might not for other people. But like when people are getting on the phone with the sales team, how are they looking at that? Is, are you pretty much open to all different kinds of projects or are there ones that you feel like are really going to be a good fit for you guys?
27:44
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, I think the sales team knows well enough where the hard nos are, but those are kind of few and far between. So basically once they get those intake forms ready, they come to a group of us and we have a review meeting every week to go over these potential projects. And again, this back and forth with the sales team of, hey, we're missing a certain input here or we just have way too many questions. Let me talk to the customer and try to hash things out. And then if the project is approved, we'll let the sales team do their thing. They'll come back to you with pricing, talk about all the different Types of services that we can offer. We do have a la carte services. If you need to do things piecemeal, that's great.
28:24
Rebecca Urciuolo
If you can do a few together, we take that into account with pricing. Once all the contracts are signed, my team gets the project officially and we hit the ground running.
28:33
Daniel Scharff
So. Okay. If I were starting another beverage company, I wouldn't even have to ask you guys the question of like, oh, have you worked on this kind of a beverage? Because you guys have worked on everything. If I'm one of the companies that's looking at freelancers, for example, like, how would you recommend that I evaluate the skillset of an individual product developer to see, like, do they really have the skillset to do what I'm doing or are they just going to say yes? And I don't even really know if they actually have the exact right background for my kind of beverage.
29:01
Rebecca Urciuolo
That's tough because again, most founders don't come with a lot of industry knowledge, so it is hard to vet. If you're lucky enough to say this is not your first rodeo or you just happen to know a little bit about the industry, like, look at their backgrounds. Not going to say like, you know, a degree is as important as hands on as they said, it's a marriage or kind of both. Look at their background. Ask them about the types of products they have worked on in the past and also ask them what their capabilities are. Like, where are they working? Like, is this just paper, you know, formula that they're giving you? Do they have a label? You know, there are a lot of different processing methods out there. So say you're doing an oat milk latte and you need an aseptic package.
29:42
Rebecca Urciuolo
People probably don't have that on the benchtop. That's a really expensive piece of equipment. So your freelancers are probably not going to have something like that. But if you're just doing, say, you know, a carbonated energy drink, they can probably help you with something a little bit more simple.
29:56
Daniel Scharff
Mm, I gotcha. So we recently had a guest on our R and D radio who is a product developer and she said, look, I'm going to say something controversial here, which is if you're creating a product and you don't already have your coman back up, start over. I think maybe it was more applicable to food in general because I think there can be so much there that's different. But do you feel like that's true for beverage as well? Like, hey, once you start working on this thing, like, don't Pass go.
30:22
Daniel Scharff
Don't like collect 200, like go back and figure out who's going to make this because that actually can be hard to find the right fit and they are going to have a lot of specification what they can and can't do and what kind of products they can make and that'll impact the formulation.
30:37
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, it is a bit of a back and forth, right. Chicken and egg type of thing. Most comands won't accept your product until they have a finished formula and processing requirements. Right. But you also might not know what your processing requirements or your package is going to be without that co man because not every co manager runs the same size package but they might have the same thermal processing. Right. So yeah, it is kind of tough to decide which is more important. We do have a lot of folks that come through that just are looking formulations for whatever reason.
31:10
Rebecca Urciuolo
And as we kind of go through those reviews because we have such an extensive copacking network, we do kind of think about that in the back of our head like, okay, it's great that this person wants to do this with this process and this package, but is that feasible? Like we don't want to give you something that you can't move forward with. Right. So Tetra Pack is a great example. If you look on the Tetra Pack website, there are dozens of sizes of Tetra Pak but only a very small segment of those are actually run at like comands in the United States. And that's. We get that all the time folks that want aseptic and they're like, oh, I want this size. And we're like no one can run that here.
31:48
Rebecca Urciuolo
We guarantee you there's not one person that can run up here in the United States. So yeah, it is definitely those two things really are married close together. But I'm not sure if one is more important than the other. They've got to work hand in hand.
32:00
Daniel Scharff
That's a funny point. I've been to the Tetrapak office in Denton, Texas and seen that wall of all the things that they make. It's wild. But you're so right. You could fall in love with some super obscure package like okay, great. Literally no co packer in this country is going to run that. Just so you know. And even, I mean when, if you take that even back to cans, one question that comes up a lot in the slack is like, hey, oh, I'm trying to do one of these mini cans. I'm debating between 8 and 8.4 ounce, which doesn't sound Like a lot to people, but actually one of those the majority of comans can run and a lot of the can companies can give you and one of them, they can't.
32:35
Daniel Scharff
And if you are married to one, like, all right, it better be worth it because you're right, really limiting the number of manufacturing partners that you might have in that area. So do you get brands then coming back to you like, okay, you gave us formulation. Now that we're actually bringing it to scale, there are a couple of things we may end up needing to tweak about it. Like, are there things that you see consistently come up in that area and if so, what are the kind of things that they might have to iron out as they scale?
33:03
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, I mean most of the time it's more of a brand identity thing than anything else. Right. Like they've got this formulation and there's been a bit of a lag between finishing the formulation and actually taking it to the co packer. And their team goes back and they do some more marketing research and they decide, oh, we really wanted like these vitamins, like instead of these vitamins or we decided these two flavors are a little too similar to each other. So yeah, most of the time it's more kind of just that like aesthetic type of thing. Had a few like small tweaks where some co packers do what's called a throw. So some co packers, they'll make concentrated syrup and then they add water to it. Later, some of them make it to beverage drinks.
33:45
Rebecca Urciuolo
So a 12 ounce beverage would just be a 12 ounce beverage. So sometimes we have to go back and just kind of tweak the formatting of formulas, things like that to make it easier for co packer. Sometimes have vendors discontinue a material or just something's just out of stock, just bad supply chain. Then we'll have to find an alternate or maybe have to do a little bit of reformulation to kind of fix that up.
34:09
Daniel Scharff
Okay, that makes sense. And then now let me take you to for me one of the most nerve wracking parts of the entire process, which is like, okay, Rebecca and BevSource gave me the formulation that I love of my dreams. Which by the way, I remember when I had a brand and we finally were doing a taste test, they would Send us like 5 different options. Like we would taste some that were kind of competitors and some, you know, whatever. And then one of the bottles I tasted and it was like the best thing I'd ever had. And I just like was like, please Let that be our one, like one of these formulations. And it was such an incredible moment of joy. Like during tastings you should have a poker face and there are other people on your team tasting.
34:44
Daniel Scharff
You shouldn't give things away. Let everyone have an unbiased sensory experience. I couldn't even contain it. It was so good. I just will never forget that moment. But then the nerve wracking part is, okay, we have our coman and we're running this and oh boy, we're running it at high volum now and you have to do the sensory test there of okay, this is what's come out. And like first you would taste it before it is even in the cans, right? Because they're going to give you a batch sample that comes out after they batch all the ingredients and you'll taste it, you might even taste it before it's carbonated, something like that.
35:15
Daniel Scharff
And what your job is at that point is to approve it and say like, yes, this is the thing that I gave you the sample of that matches my formulation and all of that. It's very high stress for someone like me because I don't have the a technical background. I'm just like, I think so, but I don't know, are the temperatures different, is the color exactly the same? And you know, I think by and large things generally went okay. There were some batches when we're working with the coman that may end up being a little bit different and it could have to do with the freshness of a specific ingredient or sometimes they actually might have a problem at the coman. They could have not cleaned the line or have used some kind of a cleaner and you're picking up a taste off that.
35:51
Daniel Scharff
So there can be problems, I guess. First question is, what is the role of the formulator at that point? Do you feel like a lot of people are coming back to you and saying like, hey, you built this beautiful thing for me. Can you just tell me, is this the thing that you built for me? Can you, can you recognize your own baby in this product that's come out of the coman? Does that. Do you find yourself playing that role a lot?
36:09
Rebecca Urciuolo
Sometimes? I mean, first and foremost you'll get what we call a gold standard, right? So whatever that locked in formula is that you love, like we're going to get you a couple of samples to take to the co mat with you, right, for that first production and you're going to use those as a reference. You're going to take that product that came off the line and you're going to look at it doesn't look the same. You're going to smell it. Does it smell the same? You're going to taste it. Does it taste the same? It's never going to be 100% right, because you have something made in a lab with samples of ingredients versus a big scale up. But it's going to be, you know, 99.9% there. Like it's going to be what you want.
36:42
Rebecca Urciuolo
And from then on the way commands work is that batch, they save samples that become the gold standard for the next batch. So you always have a reference, you know, to make sure you're getting that consistent quality. As far as kind of our role in that, it depends a bit on, you know, what kind of services that you signed up for. I mean, money talks, right? So if you've only signed up for one small service, then that's kind of fulfilled. Your statement of work is completed. We do step back. Not to say like, if you called me with a problem, I'd pick up the phone and I'd talk to you and I'd try to help you. You know, will I fly to the plant? Probably not. But if you can kind of tell me what's going on, we can spitball things together.
37:19
Rebecca Urciuolo
And a lot of that onus is going to be on the brand owner because, you know, we can help you find a co packer. But at the end of the day you have that relationship with the co packer, right? Like this is your products and this is your money, this is your production. And you know, we're not going to steer you to someone who doesn't have good quality checks, you know, or doesn't have GMP certification or anything like that. But you need to keep on top of them too. Like you need to look at your quality records, you need to check those batch sheets to make sure that if you need 10 pounds of something added, that someone really did add 10 pounds and it was the correct ingredients. Check your inventory, make sure that your ingredients are not expired.
37:58
Rebecca Urciuolo
That can make a big difference. And you know, there's always problems. No matter how good a production facility is, things are breaking down, things are happening, right? Like it only goes so smoothly and.
38:08
Daniel Scharff
You may not fly to the plant, but some people might. And I actually kind of like that idea for early brands is like, maybe if you have somebody help you with this, it might be helpful to get them to come for the first run to really check things with you. Maybe that's a job for Bob, but somebody like I really like that help, especially in the first one because it, they'll understand about the formulation but they'll understand other things that might be going on there. That just helps to have a trained eye.
38:34
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, I mean it's a service we definitely provide, but again, it depends on what did you sign up for. Right.
38:39
Daniel Scharff
Yeah.
38:39
Rebecca Urciuolo
There's only so many of us doing all the work, so got to kind of go.
38:43
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I would say if brand has the money. I like that as part of the scope of services. Just because you'll see. It's so interesting when you go to co managing, learn how the processes work. But you'll never know the things that the people who are technical know and can spot problems. And then you're just going to be sitting there a year later with a bunch of problems because you didn't have the help early on. What are some of those most common problems that you could see things going wrong for a brand at their first production? What are the kind of things that could actually take you away from the reference?
39:12
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah, I mean things like so much is out of your control. Mechanical issues. Right. These lines and you know, you've been there. These lines are running at incredibly fast speed. They're doing hundreds of cans or bottles or whatever your package is like in a minute it's just whizzing by. Something could snag you blow a gasket, anything could happen. You run out of CO2 or, you know, nitrogen, there's a clog in your capper. Right. Like little things like that. As the product sits, things can go wrong with it. If you have tunnel pasteurization, if the temperature isn't correct or if the belt's not moving at the right speed, you can kind of overcook your products and you'll taste that and a lot. And yeah, there's human error too.
39:55
Rebecca Urciuolo
Like somebody grabs the wrong material and accidentally adds a lemon flavor when it should be a mint flavor. Like all these things just, they happen. It's a very high stress, very high paced environment.
40:05
Daniel Scharff
Yes. And even I think it'll still surprise a lot of people how much of this is done on pen and paper at the commands of like checking all the different ingredients and writing things on bags and all that stuff. So definitely things can go wrong, but hopefully they won't. Hopefully your co manager diligent in that One thing that actually surprised me about this, I didn't understand this when I worked with the formulator, like, okay, great, here's the gold standard. Oh, it's so good. Everyone's gonna love this. The product changes over time, though. Much like. So I used to work at Mars, which makes M and Ms, and I remember doing the factory tour where you actually get to have the peanut M and Ms.
40:42
Daniel Scharff
When they're coming right off the line, and even you can try them before they put the candy shell on them, and it's fantastic. And you're like, wait, I have a bunch of questions I need to ask you at this point in the tour, because I want to sit here and eat all these M&M's right now. But then the product changes a lot over time. So for M and M's, yeah, it's gonna, like, harden and it's not. The peanut's not gonna taste as fresh and, you know, stuff like that. And I just. I don't know why I never put together that would happen to beverage, too. So things can taste like, oh, the flavors that you have can, like, really pop it, maybe even too much, actually, like, right off the line. And they can settle over time.
41:14
Daniel Scharff
And so even if you have like a Coca Cola Day 1 off the line, it's gonna taste really different than it might 18 months later or something like that. What's your experience like in that area? How do you talk to brands about it? How do you encourage them to think about how the flavor is going to evolve over time and what they should do in the formulation to be protect against that?
41:32
Rebecca Urciuolo
I guess that's the chemistry part right there. So, I mean, water, your beverage is going to be mostly water. Water is a solvent, so it's going to slowly break down everything in that beverage. I like to use the lasagna example. When you make a lasagna at home, it's always better the next day after, you know, it's sat in the fridge overnight. Right. It's exactly the same way with your flavors. Like, things might taste great fresh, but you really kind of want to let them sit, let those flavors kind of meld and develop to get a true picture of what it's going to look like. But as far as degradation, again, there's kind of only so much you can do about that, because that's where the chemistry comes in. Right. Like, you cannot stop any of these chemical reactions.
42:11
Rebecca Urciuolo
But when your flavor compounds are made, like, your flavorists are like master chemists, right. They understand how things are going to break down, and they can make those flavors so they're protected a little bit. And then other things are going to kind of change it too. Like your processing, if you take it through a heat process that's definitely going to change your flavor. If you're distributing in Florida, where it's hot and humid all the time, being in that kind of environment on a shelf is going to accelerate the aging. So, yeah, it is kind of tough to figure out at the end of your shelf life, at the end of that 12 months or whatever, what it's really going to be without actually tasting it. We'll always recommend you do what's called a shelf life study.
42:52
Rebecca Urciuolo
And this is where you'll take product that hopefully was made in a commercial setting. And you're basically going to put it in different environments. You're going to keep it in the refrigerator as your best case scenario, and then you're going to throw it in an incubator and heat it up as your worst case scenario. Right. And you're going to taste at different time points, and you'll see real time, like, hey, what is happening to my beverage? Like, it doesn't taste like cherry anymore. Like, what's going on? And you'll kind of have to decide as the brand owner. It's like, oh, well, I was hoping the expiration date would be 12 months, but maybe it's really only nine months. Otherwise it kind of starts, you know, tasting funky.
43:28
Daniel Scharff
That's so interesting to think through and like, okay, or you can put more flavor in it, but then that's going to change how it tastes initially. It might be even too strong there. There's so much there. Okay, last question for you, Rebecca, which is coming back to the. The cogs part of this. Honestly, when I did a beverage, I had no idea what a beverage would cost from an ingredient perspective. Like, I don't know until the end of this thing. Like, is it like this much or like 10 times that much? I don't know. Like, either of those could be true. And I would have no idea. So if you're going out to market with Rebecca's Gatorade competitor, what are you going to do to try to really understand your cogs going in?
44:04
Daniel Scharff
And when you're talking to the formulator, like, try to keep that under control because we all know beverage is an expensive game. So what tips would you have for brands working with formulators to try to keep cogs in a manageable place, relatively speaking?
44:18
Rebecca Urciuolo
Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, if you have an understanding of how much you want to spend, that's great. Like, we can work with your budget. Always kind of throw. Like, I have so many people that complain about when we get in the cogs report and I just go, hey, welcome to capitalism, right? Like that ingredient vendor is taking a cut. You know, your distributor's taking a cut, your co packers taking a cut, and then when you put it on the shelf you're taking a cut too. So yeah, have a good idea of what you want your margin to be of what you want to spend. And it's very difficult to tell you what's quote unquote cheap ingredient, right? But a good rule of thumb is if you're trying to use a novel ingredients, it's going to be more expensive.
44:58
Rebecca Urciuolo
So you know, we have folks who are like, oh, I see that beverages don't contain ingredient X and I want to use that. Well, there's probably a good reason that no one's using that material. So you might have only one supplier that makes this material. So demand's really high, supply chain's really tight. You might have something that is grown overseas and you know, has to be processed and imported into the us. There's some extra fees right there. So I think that the best thing to do is to just one, understand it's going to be expensive and try to think about, you know, what you want that margin to be. And we can work with that. You know, we've got like a wide network of distributors. So take sugar for instance, right?
45:39
Rebecca Urciuolo
Like we can get you to a distributor that's got a very good price on sugar based upon, you know, how much volume you're going to use. And the bigger your production, the cheaper it's going to be like on a per unit basis. Obviously, I think the thing most people don't think about, on top of cogs, there's what's called ingredient exposure, which is basically what's your waste. So say you have a production and you need 40 pounds of this material, but you have to buy a 50 pound box of it. Like that's just the way it's packaged. So now you have that ten pounds that might be going to waste. So you've kind of paid for that and that's money out the door. If you're doing another production that's great, you use them in the next production, right?
46:18
Rebecca Urciuolo
But there's a good chance that you're going to have materials you can use again. Juices are a great example of that. The juices are going to go bad. That's a, it's a natural product, highly perishable. You can't just hold your juices for a few months. You know, once they're open, you've got to get rid of those Yes, I.
46:34
Daniel Scharff
Have left juices out. I know how that goes. They go back pretty quick. Okay, Rebecca, I just really want to say thank you. This has been such an interesting chat and I mean, really nostalgic for me. Also, it makes me miss the whole formulation process so much.
46:48
Rebecca Urciuolo
Well, hey, if you got an idea, come back, you know, we can help you out.
46:51
Daniel Scharff
I would be so lucky to get to work with you guys. Oh, my gosh, I would love that. Especially. I always wanted to do it in person and it was pandemic, so we never got to do it that way. But I felt like that would have been so much fun to actually formulate that way. And that was actually one of the biggest impetuses for us creating the product developer databases. People ask all the time, like, hey, does anyone know someone who can do this? Like, but what would be really ideal is if they could find the right person with the right skill set who's located near them. And so that's one of the fields that we capture in the database is where are they located?
47:20
Daniel Scharff
Because it's fun and it can really cut down a lot of the feedback cycles, you know, for a lot of the reasons that you talked about. So thank you guys so much for the support to create that and all of the partnership. It's been really wonderful to get to work with you guys, especially since you're such a trusted partner to the community who I even got to work with personally and just, you know you by reputation and really love the people who work there. So thank you again. This will be incredibly useful to everybody out there and we really appreciate it.
47:47
Rebecca Urciuolo
Thank you, Daniel.
47:50
Daniel Scharff
Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast. We're a community of brands and experts and you should join. You can sign up @startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're going to hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I will see you there or on our next episode. Bye Bye.