Turning Home Recipes into Scalable Products with Dr. Jonathan Deutsch of the Drexel Food Lab
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Dr. Jonathan Deutsch started washing dishes in restaurants at 14. He went on to culinary school, worked in hotels and catering, discovered his groove in R&D, and eventually spent years developing products for major CPG companies before pivoting to academia. Today he's a professor of culinary arts and science at Drexel University and the founding program director of Drexel's Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programs. He directs the Drexel Food Lab, a culinary innovation and food product R&D lab that puts students to work on real-world food system problems, from helping emerging food entrepreneurs all the way up to the same multinational clients he served in his research chef days.
Djenaba sat down with Jonathan after the Drexel Food Lab wrapped two intensive weeks with a Food Business Bootcamp cohort, time spent helping founders move their beloved home recipes toward something shelf-stable, scalable, and commercially viable. It's not a small leap. As Jonathan puts it, the easy part is making something delicious. The hard part is making something delicious that is safe, consistent, cost-effective, and still standing on the shelf 30 days later.
And that gap, between the home kitchen and the commercial reality, is exactly where the Drexel Food Lab does its best work.
Subscribe to the Food Means Business Podcast with Hudson Kitchen founder Djenaba Johnson-Jones to hear the personal stories and "secret ingredients" of abandoning your day job and starting a CPG food business.
Tune in to hear…
Why making something delicious is the easy part, and what actually makes or breaks a food business
The one word every Drexel Food Lab client learns
How small process changes can save hours of labor, and what that math looks like at scale
Why creating a new product category can be smarter than fitting into an existing one
Why leaning into bold flavors and authentic identity beats dumbing your product down for the masses
What pH and water activity actually mean and why they are important to shelf stability
What a scheduled process is, why you can't go to market without one for certain products, and where to get one
Why you should talk to a food scientist before you've spent any money, not after
What's new at Drexel, including a 14,000 square foot kitchen and a new food entrepreneurship studio
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About Dr. Jonathan Deutsch
Jonathan Deutsch, Ph.D., CHE, CRC is Professor and Vice Chair of Health Sciences, which encompasses Culinary, Food, Nutrition, Exercise and Health Sciences at Drexel University. He is the Founding Program Director of Drexel's Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programs. He is past President of the Upcycled Food Foundation and previously was the inaugural James Beard Foundation Impact Fellow, leading a national curriculum effort on food waste reduction for chefs and culinary educators. He was named a Food Waste Warrior by Foodtank. Before moving to Drexel, Deutsch built the culinary arts program at Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the Ph.D. concentration in food studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and School of Public Health. At Drexel, he directs the Drexel Food Lab, a culinary innovation and food product research and development lab focused on solving real world food system problems in the areas of sustainability, health promotion, and inclusive dining. He is the co-author or editor of eight books including Barbecue: A Global History (with Megan Elias), Culinary Improvisation, and The Anti-Inflammatory Family Cookbook, and numerous articles in journals of food studies, public health and hospitality education. He earned his Ph.D. in Food Studies and Food Management from New York University (2004), his culinary degree from the Culinary Institute of America (AOS, Culinary Arts, 1997), and is an alumnus of Drexel University (BS, Hospitality Management, 1999). A classically trained chef, Deutsch worked in a variety of settings including product development, small luxury inns and restaurants. When not in the kitchen, he can be found behind his tuba.
Connect with Jonathan Deutsch and the Drexel Food Lab:
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Djenaba Johnson-Jones (00:36)
I'm here today with Dr. Jonathan Deutsch of the Drexel Food Lab. Welcome, Jonathan.
Jonathan Deutsch (00:41)
Thanks. Thrilled to be here.
Jonathan Deutsch (00:47)
Yeah, I'm a professor of culinary arts and science at Drexel. So that's sort of my day job. And part of my job is the Drexel Food Lab, which works with students to do culinary innovation projects. I have a background as a chef. I started cooking and dishwashing in restaurants at 14 and did restaurants, hotels, catering, all sorts of stuff like that. Went to culinary school and really found my groove in R &D.
Jonathan Deutsch (01:13)
working in food product development, culinary innovation products, originally for big CPG companies. And then after doing that for a while, pivoted into education and was sort of doing a side hustle teaching community college culinary by day and helping folks with innovation projects at night.
Jonathan Deutsch (01:33)
And then at Drexel, I was able to combine those two worlds. So we have students engaged in all sorts of projects, like helping the folks at Hudson Kitchen and all the way up through some of the same multinational clients who I worked for in my research chef days.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (01:49)
Awesome. So yeah, we had the privilege of having you and your team for two weeks with our bootcamp cohort was amazing for them to be able to be in the kitchen and take their recipe, refine it, and then scale it. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you did with them?
Jonathan Deutsch (02:03)
Yeah, so we do this kind of work a lot. Many people have great ideas for food businesses, and many people have wonderful home recipes. And I think as they learn that sort of easy part, it's pretty easy to make something delicious. And it's pretty hard to make something delicious that is shelf stable, is within your cost guidelines, has a predictable supply chain.
Jonathan Deutsch (02:26)
can be sold at the price point you want it to be sold at, all of those other factors that make things really complicated. And so what we did was really help them the first week think through those other factors. Just because it's a tasty dish doesn't necessarily mean it's a stable and scalable CPG product. And then the second class, we really focused on the scalability. Now that you have this down,
Jonathan Deutsch (02:48)
and you think you can make this consistently with the supply chain and the safety and all of those issues, you know, locked down, can you do this at scale and do it consistently day after day? And, you know, we talk a lot with our students about the fact that it's pretty easy to make tasty food. The challenge is to make tasty food consistently with a
Jonathan Deutsch (03:09)
keeping your labor cost in check, keeping your food cost in check, making profit. All of those things are really where the art comes in.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (03:15)
thought it was really interesting. know you were in the kitchen with one of our cohort members, they were peeling their own garlic, and they were also chopping their own chilies. And you guys made some recommendations to help them streamline the process. and also some ingredient recommendations to help them cut down on cost. Can you talk a little bit about that in little more detail?
Jonathan Deutsch (03:34)
Yeah.
Jonathan Deutsch (03:34)
I mean, one of the challenges with food manufacturing is that home cooking is different from restaurant cooking or food service. And that in turn is different from commercial cooking. depending on the capabilities of the plant you're working with for scale up, something as simple that you do every day, like how many recipes start with dicing an onion, sauteing it, the plant may not be capable of doing that. Right. So you have to take your recipe and say, okay, now I'm buying
Jonathan Deutsch (04:00)
a sauteed frozen diced onion that I'm just dumping in the kettle because that's what the plant is capable of doing. And so there's a lot of compromise. I would say if there's one word that our clients learn from working with us, it's compromise, right? Because something has to give, right? You can't have perfect food that tastes super fresh and people are only paying a small amount of money for it. And you're paying your workers fairly.
Jonathan Deutsch (04:27)
Something has to give somewhere. And so it's all about compromise and finding the things that you're willing to let go and the things that if you let them go, it wouldn't be your product anymore. It wouldn't be a product that you could stand.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (04:39)
What are some common challenges that are bootcamp cohort based?
Jonathan Deutsch (04:44)
So I would say the biggest one is stability. A lot of these recipes that we worked with come from beloved home recipes that are not meant to last a long time. If you make something delicious at home, it's probably gone that day or maybe the next day. It's a very different, your famous cupcake recipe, you make it for a birthday party. It doesn't sit around the house for long.
Jonathan Deutsch (05:09)
But what do you do if your retailer wants a 30-day shelf life on that? Is it going to require the use of ingredients? And this is, again, where the compromise comes in. Are you going to have to add some ingredients or additives that you might not want on your label or that you're not comfortable ethically including? Do you have some sort of alternative distribution system where you're doing daily delivery rather than taking back the unsold ones?
Jonathan Deutsch (05:34)
you really have to figure things out. So figuring out the stability of how to meet these demands, whether it's a retailer or a food service customer is a big one. And then also figuring out the process to scale up. So yeah, we were talking about one of the clients who was seeding, individually seeding peppers, and it took hours and that's fine. You sometimes, you know, I love cooking at home.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (05:50)
Yeah.
Jonathan Deutsch (05:56)
Sometimes, you know, you can get your kids or family members engaged in those tasks. You'd have a conversation, drink some coffee. Like, it could be really nice, but that's not a scalable model. And often, it just comes down to thinking differently. So, you know, I said, well, what if you, you know, we started, well, what if you leave those seeds in? Will it make it bitter? I don't think so. Will it make it too spicy? I don't think so. Will it make it unattractive? I don't think so. Well, let's try it.
Jonathan Deutsch (06:22)
and see, and sure enough, like they could cut out that step and saved, you know, a couple hours in labor, which doesn't sound like much, but when you scale that over, at 20 or $25 an hour times, you know, 50 weeks a year times five days a week, it becomes a lot.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (06:40)
Yeah, for sure. We had one client, and actually just spoke with her earlier, Lan, who, or one cohort member, who thought she was making chicken jerky and ended up with a different product. Can you talk a little about how you helped her through that process?
Jonathan Deutsch (06:54)
Yeah, that was a really interesting case because I think a lot of it is perception and marketing. You know, we eat with our eyes and that's especially true on branded goods because we were looking at the package and the label and what things are called. so Lan was trying to go to market with something that is a traditional Vietnamese dried chicken snack. And she was translating that to
Jonathan Deutsch (07:16)
a US consumer by calling it chicken jerky. And when we did some market research in the past, and she did as well and said, you know, it's like beef jerky, but it's chicken. And people kind of said like, no, I'm good with beef jerky. That's not that interesting to me. And one of the things we said was to lean into the authenticity of this product. This is something that is enjoyed in Vietnam.
Jonathan Deutsch (07:40)
It's a traditional dish. She's bringing it to the U S maybe as a consumer, I say, well, this is kind of like a chicken jerky if I don't have any other frame of reference, but there's nothing wrong with starting a new category and saying like, this is a new thing that, that is exciting and no one else is doing it. And you don't, doesn't have to mimic something else. you know, another way to think about it is, Sriracha is a hot sauce, but they didn't call it a Vietnamese thicker.
Jonathan Deutsch (08:05)
hot sauce in a rooster bottle. They just call it sriracha and everyone got on board and it was essentially an invented sauce based on traditional sambal, right? And there's lots of foods like that. If you say, cabbage with, you'd be like, that sounds kind of gross, but everyone loves kimchi and it's, and sauerkraut for that matter, right? People know what they are.
Jonathan Deutsch (08:29)
And you just have to introduce new language, I think, to the marketplace.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (08:34)
it could be part of it as education for the market.
Jonathan Deutsch (08:36)
Yeah,
Jonathan Deutsch (08:37)
I think education and also not, I'm a big proponent of not dumbing things down. So when I was in CPG, we really cooked to the least common denominator. you know, the example I always give is like, if we did a Thai curry, be like, all right, well, first of all, we need to take out the shrimp paste and the fish sauce because of allergens. Second of all, let's make it mild because some people don't like spicy and you can always add hot sauce, but you can't take it away.
Jonathan Deutsch (09:00)
Right. at the end of it, you get like an airplane food version of, of curry and you're losing everybody, right? You're not, you're not appealing. You're, you're not offending anyone, but you're also not appealing to anyone. So, you know, I, I've been, I've been pleased that so many of, of the products in the cohort, like Lan's, like the, salsa macha or, you know, big bold flavors. not saying.
Jonathan Deutsch (09:24)
this might be too spicy for you. I'm not sure if you're ready for it. They're just saying this is it. Get on board and ensure it's not for everyone. But what we find is that people who are here for it are really going, you know, they're fans or super fans are buying it every week. And that more than makes up for the part of the market who says, I don't really do spicy. I'm going to pass on.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (09:46)
Yeah, both of them have actually gotten some really great feedback about their products. So it's really, really exciting. I'll be honest, I didn't know about pH and water activity. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and how you measure it and what it's for? Yeah.
Jonathan Deutsch (09:58)
Yeah. So
Jonathan Deutsch (10:01)
to make something shelf stable, there's kind of two magic numbers. One is pH, one is water activity. pH is acidity. And the lower the pH in general, the safer the food. And so many products, the easiest way to make something shelf stable, if it's a liquid that's acidic, is called high acid hot fill.
Jonathan Deutsch (10:21)
And we like to see the magic number is 4.6, but there's a margin of error. So we like to see like 4.1, 4.0. And you know and love these products. You see them every day. Things like tomato sauce, ketchup, pickles in a jar. Now, the way that works is if the pH is low enough, meaning it's very acidic and nothing can live in there, and you bring it to a proper temperature, which is usually around
Jonathan Deutsch (10:45)
like 180 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and you put that in a jar and you cap it immediately, it's done. The process is done. Now there has to be appropriate approvals, scheduled process, and so on. can't just do this anywhere for sale. But in general, that's a very safe and reliable way. And if the pH is higher than that, if it's low acid,
Jonathan Deutsch (11:08)
Then you have to do what's called retort, which is how something like a can of beans or a of tuna is made, where it's cooked at a super hot temperature under pressure, and that kills everything thermally. So it's great news if someone has a low pH product that is something like a hot sauce, tomato sauce, something like that, because it's very easy to process compared to something that's low acid. So that's the pH part of
Jonathan Deutsch (11:32)
The other thing you can do to make something shelf stable is to make sure it's sufficiently dry through low water activity, right? Which is not always exactly the same as moisture. For example, honey is a liquid, but it's so sugar saturated that it's low water activity, because that refers to the amount of free water that's available for microbial growth. for water activity,
Jonathan Deutsch (11:56)
What you're looking for is .80 or below. And the easiest way to explain that is if you think of something like pasta. If you have a 10-year-old box of pasta in your cabinet, it's perfectly safe to eat. It might not taste delicious, but you're not going to see mold or any sort of like weird growth on it because it's so dry, nothing can live on there. And so you're not going to have any risk of that. But if you take cooked pasta,
Jonathan Deutsch (12:22)
and you left it on your counter overnight, it would start to smell, you would see mold in a couple days, it would not be safe to eat. It's the exact same food, just one has a very low water activity and one has a very high water activity. So managing that is key.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (12:36)
Will you please explain the scheduled process and like where somebody would actually get one of those?
Jonathan Deutsch (12:41)
Yeah. So, scheduled process is used for when you're processing something like a canned good that has no, it's anaerobic, no oxygen. And it's really primarily a prevention against botulism, which can live in a lot of pretty tough environments for other bacteria and mold and yeast.
Jonathan Deutsch (12:59)
And you have to basically go through the process of explaining how you're going to prepare your food in a way that's safe and will have sufficient lethality for any of those bacteria or mold. So it may involve something like that high acid hot fill. It may need to be pasteurized after. It may need to be cooked in a retort. It all depends on the different product.
Jonathan Deutsch (13:21)
And there are regional process authorities. Ours in the Northeast is Cornell University. And there are private consultants who are process authorities as well and can do a scheduled process. But it's an application. It doesn't cost a lot. without that, you can't go to market with something like a canned goods.
Jonathan Deutsch (13:45)
Yeah, first thing is to get a food scientist on board early. We do a lot of undoing, which is really frustrating for us and for the client. They say, I've been working on this so long. I've already spent so much money. And now you're telling me you need more money. And it's like, yeah, well, if you, if you talked to us a year ago, we would have told you not to go down these roads and saved you way more money than we're asking for. Right. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is to work with someone like you.
Jonathan Deutsch (14:11)
You need to have an approved commercial kitchen. There are some cottage industry laws in certain municipalities that you can do things out of your house. Or if you're a farmer, there's a little bit more generous ability to make things yourself. But for the most part, you need an approved commercial kitchen. And, you know, we frankly have seen a lot of food samples that have dog hair on them and just, you know, it's not the home is a great place to live.
Jonathan Deutsch (14:38)
and be with your family and have good times together. It's just generally not a great place to run a food business. So I really encourage folks to find the right place and the right expertise and it's out there. We're very affordable and accessible and I know we have colleagues around the country in shared kitchens and university extension and all sorts of places who are happy to help.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (14:59)
Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. At Hudson Kitchen, have, we call the money bell that we ring when folks are celebrating something and wondering what you're celebrating.
Jonathan Deutsch (15:08)
I'm celebrating a lot. We just finished renovating two spaces, which we're really excited about. One is called our Dietzen Watson Food Technology Lab, sponsored by Dietzen Watson, who's both an alum and an employer of our program. And that gives us lot of capability to do home recipe testing. We have 14,000 square feet of kitchen. And similar to Hudson Kitchen, I believe, we don't just have like a rinky-dink home oven.
Jonathan Deutsch (15:34)
We still don't, because we have a really tricked out nice home kitchen now. But when we're trying to help an entrepreneur, say like back of package directions, bake at 350 for 15 minutes, until now we've had to go home to do that stuff. So now we have basically upscale home kitchen in our facility. The other thing that's great for is content. So we do a lot of content and social media.
Jonathan Deutsch (15:55)
And we get pushbacks sometimes, especially if we're saying like, here's a great recipe you could try at home. Someone inevitably says, yeah, if I had a kitchen like that with all the stainless steel and all the bells and whistles, I could do it, but I couldn't do it at home. But now we can show them like, yes, this can be done in a home kitchen. And then we have some benchtop space for food analysis, pH, water activity, and so on. So that's awesome.
Jonathan Deutsch (16:17)
And then we also have a space called the Dr. Stuart Schulman Food Entrepreneurship and Innovation Studio, which is a mouthful named for an entrepreneurship professor at City University of New York who's beloved by me and others. And he's been very instrumental in helping our students and community members advance their business from the business side perspective.
Jonathan Deutsch (16:41)
And that's always, you know, we can't do everything. We always say we're the hands dirty people. So if our hands are dirty, we're happy. And if someone says, well, what about supply chain consultants? And what about, you know, raising capital? We say you need to find someone like Stu or like Djenaba or someone with that expertise. And so, you know, partnerships are key, but that gives our entrepreneurs a place to co-work.
Jonathan Deutsch (17:06)
It allows us to have board meetings, hybrid meetings, all sorts of things. So we're really excited about that. And we're, I would say our most exciting feature are our students. We have a number of programs that I think will be of interest. If someone's made it this far in the podcast, you are obviously interested in food and food innovation. So we have undergrad and grad degrees in culinary arts and food science.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (17:24)
you
Jonathan Deutsch (17:31)
And we have an undergrad certificate in food entrepreneurship that's designed to be paired with another Drexel major and a graduate certificate in food innovation. So hope to see some folks in our lab as well.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (17:43)
Awesome, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Let everyone know how they can find out about the Drexel Food Lab.
Jonathan Deutsch (17:48)
Great, the easiest thing is to just type Drexel Food Lab into any search engine or we're at Drexel.edu slash FHM, Food and Hospitality Management.
Djenaba Johnson-Jones (18:01)
Cool, thank you.
Jonathan Deutsch (18:02)
Thank you.