OTL Ep. 6: F&F Challenges: When the Flavor Wheel Breaks

The Flavor Wheel Is Breaking — Here's How F&F Manufacturers Are Fixing It 

Welcome to On the Line with Laminar, our series where we go inside the world of process manufacturing to hear what's really driving change on the production floor. 

In this episode, Sanjay Rajan, Head of Go-to-Market at Laminar, sits down with Jon Mindnich, Account Executive at Laminar, who spends the majority of his time with flavor and fragrance customers — including several of the top brands in the industry. They cover what's keeping F&F operations teams up at night, how the flavor wheel works (and why new product types are breaking it),and how Laminar is helping customers move from reactive to proactive quality control. 

The #1 Challenge in  Flavour and Fragrance Industry: Capacity Constraints 

Sanjay: You've been spending a lot of time with some of the top flavor and fragrance brands. What are you hearing? What's keeping them awake? 

How New Flavors and Fragrances Are Increasing CIP Frequency 

Jon: The number one thing I hear every single time is capacity constraints. These are companies who are constantly taking in orders and trying to deliver them to the best of their ability. And one of the newer issues arising in the industry is the different types of new products coming at them — new types of flavors, new types of fragrances and scents. Because of that, they're having to do different types of cleaning, or prolonged cleanings, as opposed to much quicker rinse steps. That leads directly to less time to produce their products and get them out to customers. 

Why Missed Delivery Windows Cost F&F Manufacturers Market Share 

Jon: One of the more recent things I heard from a customer is around delivery times. They have a set time they've always tried to stay to — you receive an order, this is when your customer is going to get it.That's a trust you build. And unfortunately, with some of the newer flavors coming across their factory floors, they're not hitting those deadlines. The worst case scenario is that they go to one of your biggest competitors. 

What Is the Flavor Wheel in Flavor and Fragrance Manufacturing? 

Sanjay: Talk about the flavor wheel. How do customers schedule production around it, and how are new product requirements interrupting that thinking? 

Jon: The flavor wheel is designed to maximize your time actually filling products. The way it works is that certain flavors are compatible with each other — so you can schedule eight to ten SKUs that you can continuously produce withjust 15-minute water flushes in between. But once you run out of those compatible products and you're going from, say, cucumber to blackberry, you actually have to do a full Clean-In-Place because those flavors are just not compatible the way the others are. 

Why New Products Are Disrupting the Flavor Wheel 

Sanjay: And when they get a new combination they haven't seen before, I'd assume they start conservative — run a full CIP and just not take a chance? 

Jon: Exactly. The last thing you want is a rinse step that doesn't fully flush everything out and then you start bringing in an already developed product that you have to drain. So they're doing a lot moreCIPs. And it takes a long time for quality teams to feel confident enough to go back to those shorter rinse steps. 

What's specific to flavor and fragrance is that you can receive a product order and not see that same product again for three months.So when you're dealing with newer flavors, it can take a really long time to build up the confidence to set a shorter rinse step instead of going through a full Clean-In-Place cycle every time. 

How Laminar's Self-Driving Clean-in-Place Expands the Flavor Wheel 

Sanjay: That's exactly where Laminar comes in.  touch on how customers think about the status quo versus bringing our technology in. 

Jon: I actually just had this conversation on site with one of our customers. Their final gold status phase of the project is to expand their flavor wheel — because what we're providing is science-driven data at a sub-second level of what's occurring during each step in the process, whether it's changeover or Clean-In-Place. That data gives them the ability to feel more confident. Instead of defaulting to a full CIP, maybe they can do a rinse — and instead of a fixed timer, they let Laminar shorten it as necessary. 

Validating CIP Set Points in Real Time — Beyond Fixed Timers 

Jon: The second thing I've been hearing recently is around set points. CIP has a lot of required set points from a quality standpoint — you have to reach a certain temperature to move on from a water step, your chemical step has conductivity set points, there are flow setpoints.  

What our technology shows is when each step — pre-rinse, caustic, final rinse, sanitizer — has actually been completed. And by bringing in probes for temperature, flow, and conductivity, we can also show what those readings are at the exact moment our model predicts you can move forward. 

Pushing Validated CIP Further — Lowering Rinse Temperatures withConfidence 

One customer I work with has already gone through full validation and is now asking: what happens if we decrease our rinse step temperature from 70 degrees Celsius down to 68? Will it still pass validation?They're doing this because while they're seeing fantastic savings already, they feel there's a lot of meat left on the bone. 

Sanjay: And this real-time closed-loop automation approach is especially powerful in flavor and fragrance specifically. If you're running a combination once and not seeing it again for three months, historical data is useless. You've never runthat combination before. The ability to close the loop in real time rather than depend on yesterday's data is a genuine game changer. 

Self-Driving Quality Control in Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients 

Sanjay: Talk about where customers are going from reactive to proactive — specifically around product quality during changeover. 

Jon: This is more specific to the changeover process — going from one product to another and ultimately bottling it. The reactive to proactive shift is aboutgiving customers the ability to understand when a product may be missing aningredient from the batching process, or when there was too much of something — where that product actually should not have continued down theline to bottling. 

What they're currently doing is taking grab samples to ensure the product is what they want to put out on the market. That process takes a lot of time and pulls people away from other work. But by using our spectral sensors and seeing everything at a sub-second level, we can create fingerprints of what a good quality product should look like. If it starts to deviate from that fingerprint, we send an immediate flag to the operator — stop this now, something didn't get done correctly. Instead of finding the problem at the very end of the process, you catch it much earlier. That's where reactive versus proactive really comes into play. 

Why F&F Tolerance for Error Is So Low 

Sanjay: And pulling it all back to capacity constraints and delivery times — their tolerance for error is very low. 

Jon: Extremely low. They can't afford any missteps because it all comes back to keeping the customer happy and meeting delivery times. Any misstep causes delays further down the road. Being able to not onlyeliminate those delays but also speed up the processes holding them back from additional production output is a real game changer for these organizations. 

The Industry Powering Everything We Taste and Smell 

Sanjay: I'd never worked with flavour and fragrance before joining Laminar. It's been an eye-opener —these are silent factories that power all the food science behind everything we eat and drink. Any closing thoughts? 

Jon: It really is incredible. I didn't know that the products we eat and drink every day weren't fully manufactured by the brands on the label. I actually work with two customers — one on the brewing side and one on the flavor and fragrance side — who have a symbiotic relationship.  

One provides the flavoring that goes into the other's product. Going on site and seeing the labels of one of my customers in a completely different plant that is ultimately producing what I'm going to drink on the weekend — that was really something. 

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