Creative Food Solutions is a full-service food innovation consultancy that works closely with its clients to incorporate trending ideas in the restaurant industry and bring them to life. The company has weekly meetings with a tight-knit group of five chefs.
Recognized as an R&D lab for large food manufacturers, before using meez, Director of Culinary Services, Ben Lee struggled to create, manage, and share client recipes in an organized fashion.
A former colleague of Josh Sharkey, CEO/founder of meez, Lee left the restaurant industry in 2018 to join Creative Food Solutions. The two reconnected two years later to talk about how meez could improve his team’s recipe creation process.
“With my restaurant experience, I strive to achieve a gold standard and keep up with the latest trends in the industry. My main responsibility is to bring restaurant concepts to life and incorporate them into our work."
While R&D is sometimes as simple as writing up a recipe at Creative Food Solutions, some of their clients require a more food science-oriented approach.
For example, one of their confectionary clients has strict salt and wellness guidelines. They limit the amount of sugar and calorie consumption per serving. The nutrition aspect of meez gives Lee a starting point, which he can eventually pass on to the manufacturer or client.
The company's largest client by far is Mars food services, where they work on both the confectionary and savory sides for their food service and retail targets, including restaurants, QSRs, universities, and schools.
“When we present formulations to our commercial food manufacturers, they are given in percentages. meez does the work for us."
Having percentages is crucial in any kitchen, but especially in food science. Being able to target a key ingredient and adjust the percentages with meez makes recording tests significantly more efficient.
Before providing a conclusive analysis to a client, Creative Food Solutions tests products dozens of times. Adjusting the percentages of key ingredients, even from 0.1% to 0.2%, could make a significant difference in a CPG's competitiveness in the market.
“meez takes it to another efficiency level by giving the recipe writer the option to choose the percentage based on 100% of total ingredients versus a Baker's Percentage. It’s so convenient”.
Before meez, Creative Food Solutions didn’t have a standardized recipe writing format. Despite the whole team having a culinary background, each member of our team has a different approach to recipe writing. With Excel, everyone could chime in and make edits to a recipe, which meant there were different versions of the same recipe available.
“We used to rely on Excel spreadsheets, but they were limited in functionality, difficult to distribute to team members, and simply unprofessional-looking. It was fine for in-house use, but when it came to sharing recipes and percentages, it didn't always look right. It's pretty cool that we can now share the file with others, and even include videos and photos.”
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