‘I smell and taste spoilt milk’: The man behind your everyday drinks

I am 49, and I have had a hand in developing and launching more than 300 products throughout my 20-odd years as a drinks scientist at Fraser and Neave (F&N). I deal with food products as well, although they make up only a small portion of my work. A combination of art, science, technology, and innovation drives my work, so you can call me a food technologist too.

My colleagues and I are passionate about our jobs. My day often begins with my team members serving me coffee – not because they have to or want to, but because they would like me to taste their products. Different milk specifications can alter the flavour of a cup of coffee. We try to show how our milk can create different foaming properties to make various latte art designs.

Part of my job is training and mentoring more than 30 food technologists in Singapore and Malaysia. Some of my team members have undergone barista training, so our “in-house baristas” can ensure our milk is suitable for lattes, for instance. We call this an application trial to understand the needs of our food and beverage businesses and consumers.

Let’s say a product has a 12-month shelf life. I need to taste the product every week to monitor the changes and understand the science behind it. This is part of the training for the job.

A misconception people have about my job is that I spend a lot of time in the lab, that’s not true. I meet and speak to many people, including our team in the marketing, procurement, and purchasing departments, because we decide on the ingredients to buy when we develop a new product. We have more than 10 manufacturing plants in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

I also spend a lot of time looking at artificial intelligence tools to understand market trends and new product launches. We would buy these new products worldwide to test them.

Every new product has its own story

Before a new product is launched, it typically goes through many rounds of tasting.

For some products, it can take up to hundreds of tries to meet our taste benchmark.

It is very hard to learn from textbooks, so we must learn from past experiences. This is why every month, I get my team to share what they have learnt. We document the information in our library as part of standard operating procedures so that newcomers will not repeat the same mistakes.

Our research and development (R&D) team develops more than 100 recipes each year, which may either be launched or added to our library for future use.

Every new product has its own story, but one of the memorable ones for me was developing a brown sugar milk beverage under F&N Magnolia that we launched during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I still remember the date – it was 21 April 2020, the day the government suddenly announced that bubble tea shops would have to close temporarily.

We saw it as an opportunity to push out a product as fast as possible to get market share. Typically, developing a new product takes a long time, from six months to a year. So, it was a big challenge. But we managed to launch it in May, just a month later.

In this instance, we had already done some early preparations. When we observed the bubble tea trend, we started developing the product internally. It was a good learning point. Preparing early allowed us to grab the opportunity when it came along; otherwise, we would have been too late. It was the first success we had in launching a new product so quickly.

100Plus is a familiar drink to many people, but it was actually developed about 42 years ago by my predecessors for a one-time event to mark the company’s 100th anniversary. We recently launched its zero-sugar version, and it was a very difficult project because it meant we had to match the taste of the original product. We had to repeat many rounds of testing. But when it was well received by consumers, we felt happy.

We feel proud that these days, we are able to transform our products into something functional, with the help of a few professors from universities in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. An example is the 100Plus hydration bar – in a popsicle format with reduced sugar – where we looked at whether it serves the function of reducing heat stress.

 

How it started

My first degree is in chemical engineering, and later, I completed a master's in bioprocessing engineering. After graduating, my first job was at a cocoa and chocolate company. It was my first exposure to the food industry, where I started tasting products.

Cocoa itself has many types, and different beans give different tastes. From there, I felt inspired to become a food technologist. In that job, I travelled the world, including to Brazil and Mexico. I have tried many kinds of food worldwide.

I applied to join F&N because I was impressed by the company's diverse range of product categories. During the job interview, I told the interviewer that I was surprised to be called up since I was not a food technologist.

At the time, the company wanted to launch a yogurt and yogurt drink and was looking for someone who could look at the bigger picture, from formulation to scaling up production. I reported to the marketing general manager then, so I needed to learn how to sell the product and make it marketable too.

Along the way, I took on more responsibilities in other product categories, including milk, soya milk, and juice.

Food technologists with a diploma receive a monthly salary that starts from S$2,500, and those with a degree start from S$4,000.

I recently completed my Doctor of Philosophy or PhD in sports nutrition and clinical trials, as I need to understand the efficacy of certain ingredients and how they can benefit consumers functionally. For instance, I was leading the preparations for a series of clinical trials that studied the effects of an isotonic beetroot drink on high-intensity exercise performance.

I took the initiative to train and become a qualified phlebotomist who can draw blood from participants to analyse their body response after consuming drinks during clinical trials.

Tasting spoilt products

To understand the products better, I smell and taste spoilt milk, yogurt, and other types of food and drinks too. When milk turns sour, I am curious to taste it to know what the sourness is like.

Another example is when a yogurt drink has yeast contamination, it will produce an alcoholic taste. We have to taste it; otherwise, how will we know it tastes alcoholic? We have to know when yeast contamination happens. I have a high sense of curiosity, so I would use myself as an experiment.

When I first joined the company, I had mild diarrhoea and similar issues for up to a year because I had to taste milk every day. I tried finding out why – only to realise that I am lactose intolerant. Before this job, I did not drink a lot of milk. I learnt to adjust my milk intake, and I cannot drink more than a cup a day. Even though they are in small quantities, we have many products to taste.

This information is important for me – understanding the food we consume every day and how it affects our bodies. This is why I fell in love with this job, and why I wanted to pursue my PhD.

 

The science of mixing ingredients

One of the trends is mixing soya milk with juice. In the past, it was not possible as juice is acidic, and the soya milk would curdle. But with technology, we can make sure this does not happen. The same goes for mixing hojicha with soya milk for the F&N NutriSoy brand.

Traditionally, mixing Earl Grey or Chinese tea with soya milk would not have tasted nice. Technology and special ingredients – stabiliser and flavouring – helped make the tea and soya milk blend together.

I am particularly interested in soya beans because of their influence on the quality of a cup of coffee. Creating a soya milk that pairs well with coffee is a complex process, especially for barista-style applications. Choosing the right soya bean variety is critical – if it is not carefully selected or processed, the milk could clash with the coffee’s flavour, resulting in an unpleasant taste.

We have invested years of R&D into selecting the right soya bean varieties and refining our processing methods. It is exciting to see more coffee drinkers – including those who previously opted for oat or almond milk – embracing soya milk to go with their coffee.

 

‘That was a big failure’

Natural ingredients like tea leaves and soya beans are quite difficult to work with.

How do we ship them to our manufacturing facilities and preserve them?

Maintaining quality is challenging.

For example, when a soya bean turns purple, it means mould has started growing inside, and a purple bean is considered a reject that we do not want.

A food technologist is not a mixologist because we want the product to not only taste good but also last throughout its shelf life. There is science behind colours, favours, and stabilisers, so we need to understand their interactions with one another.

We must know all the rules in colour science. There was an incident where our flavoured soya milk had to be shipped from Peninsular Malaysia to East Malaysia, and because it was exposed to direct sunlight during shipment, the colour changed. That was a big failure.

Sometimes we have 20 to 30 ingredients in a product, and extreme conditions may alter the form or quality of the product, so we have a robust process to ensure quality.

Some technologists ask me why they couldn't launch a single new product during their three-year tenure. There are many reasons why a product cannot be launched – it could have become a lower-priority assignment, for instance, or the result did not meet expectations.

The proudest moments for me and my team are seeing our products on the shelves. Each one of them is like our baby. We are always excited about product launches because a lot of hard work goes into them. They could take as short as three months to as long as three years.

But the story does not end there. Can the product survive many years in the market?

When a product is launched, I would go down to visit the supermarkets after work and think: Why did they not pick up my product? According to industry and business research, only 5 per cent of new products succeed – the rate is very low.

 

Travelling for ingredients

The cycle of product development starts from ingredients sourced from farms. I have travelled to Canada and North America to look at soya beans. Recently, I went to Ireland to look at cow farms and talk to the farmers.

At the farms, I noticed that each Holstein cow – one of the world's highest milk producers – has a different set of patterns. It is like their thumbprint. This was something new to me. They also said each cow drinks 150 litres of water a day because they are always thirsty.

I have also travelled to China to source tea leaves. There are many types of tea, like pu’er or tie guan yin. A farmer told me an important fact: Generally, all tea types come from the same species of plant. The difference is in how they harvest and how they process the tea leaves.

When we launched yuzu juice in Singapore, the benchmark in the market was Japanese yuzu. So we bought yuzu juice concentrate from Japan and developed it from there. Even for apples, there are thousands of varieties that have different tastes.

To develop the best drink, how do we find the benchmark for it? For teh tarik specifically, I went to mamak stalls in Malaysia to find those that serve good ones. For me, it is too subjective. So we leveraged our supplier partner who brings advanced sensory tools to identify the aroma and flavour of the drink.

To make it easier to describe the aroma or taste among ourselves, including the sales and marketing teams, we must speak the same sensory language, also termed as sensory lexicon. What is considered sweet or creamy? The definition of sweet for many people, as well as in different countries, can be very different.

Staff who are interested in joining our sensory evaluations – conducted in sensory booths – will be required to undergo training and a basic screening test before they can qualify as a panellist. Some protocols have to be observed, such as making sure samples are prepared hygienically. Also, no discussions are allowed, this is to prevent personal biases from influencing the participants’ decisions.

Occupational hazard

For fresh milk, my team and I are able to identify the taste differences in various sources of milk, including their countries of origin.

There are many criteria to do well in the job, such as having a passion for food and drinks as well as patience in developing a product.

I can be critical about the food and drinks I consume. It is an occupational hazard. The first thing I would do is read the label and understand the product. Is it a safe drink? Is it good to drink? What ingredients are used to make it successful? We do reverse engineering in our innovation.

Consumers generally do not have the habit of reading labels, which is why the Health Promotion Board tries to educate people with the Nutri-Grade mark, making it easier to read with A, B, C, and D. We prepared early and started to work on recipes with reduced sugar. There is a more than 60 per cent sugar reduction in our recipes as compared with 10 years ago.

There are also failures – there’s no perfection in everything, right? Every failure means a big U-turn, where we need to restart the ideation process. The other part of failure is realising that the product cannot be scaled up. This means a product can turn out well in the lab but not when it is created for larger-scale production. That’s why we also have a pilot plant in Tuas to test the scalability of a product before we push for big-scale production to avoid incurring losses.

Normally, we wouldn’t say “what I like” or “what I don’t like”. Of course, we have personal preferences. But I’ve already trained myself and my team to focus on what consumers like instead. At the end of the day, what I like is not that important.

Source: The Straits Times ©️ SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.