ColdSnap

Building Compliance from the Beginning

As I’ve moved through my career from large, well-established food companies into small, novel food start-ups, I’ve come to see three areas where food safety and quality play a critical role to support success.

The first priority is making sure the organization understands it is entering a highly regulated food manufacturing environment, one with its own strict laws, regulations and industry norms. In nearly every case, a start-up is ultimately selling its product in a package to another food company, a retailer or a foodservice channel and that customer will expect the exciting new concept to carry the same certifications they see on everything else on their shelves. They’ll want specifications that meet their needs, fill weights that comply with regulations, and packaging that conforms to barcode and pallet norms across the board.

Getting the Foundations Right

To realistically sell their products, start-ups need to be FDA registered and GFSI certified, with food safety and HACCP plans that genuinely address the product’s risk profile and satisfy regulations that, frankly, were never written with groundbreaking products in mind. 

Because so many breakthrough products come out of a hightech or academic background, these requirements are often genuinely new to the founders of most food start-ups. 

It’s the role of Food Safety to ensure this is in place. It’s easy to miss important elements when they aren’t built in early, and it only gets more expensive to fix them after the fact.

Planning the Path from Pilot Batch to Full Scale

The second priority, and one that also needs attention early in the start-up journey, is how you intend to evolve from manufacturing expensive, small-batch trial volumes to full commercial scale. Whether you work with a manufacturing partner or invest in your own facility, the process has to be food safe and scalable at a volume and price point that enables the company to become commercially viable in a competitive marketplace.

Don’t get too attached to your original price estimates, either. You shouldn’t expect the competition to welcome you into their market without a fight. Burn rates and cash runways are the defining challenge at most start-ups, so making sure your core food safety systems and teams are appropriately sized and ready for rapid scale-up is essential.

That same scaling challenge extends, often even more urgently, to raw material supply chains. If you’re working with ingredients that are new to the food industry, you need more than just GRAS clearance. You need suppliers who are building their own food-safe processes that can scale alongside yours, and who genuinely understand what supplying the food industry requires. A brilliant product can still stall out on an unprepared supply chain.

Bringing in Real Food Industry Experience

The third priority is building a team with real food industry experience. The scientists and engineers who have the deep technical knowledge to invent something new rarely carry the same background, instincts and industry relationships that people with long careers in conventional food companies bring. That gap shows up well beyond food safety, in manufacturing, engineering, maintenance, planning, logistics and in whatever sales and marketing approach your product needs.

It is essential that those new hires adjust to what can feel like a radically different culture from the one they came from. But it’s the successful merging of both worlds, the inventors and the operators, that raises the odds of commercial success while keeping food safety and other costly risks in check.

Working as a food safety professional at a start-up comes with its own unique set of challenges. But the chance to help build something entirely new, and to shape how it enters the market safely and successfully, makes it one of the more rewarding paths in this industry.