We craft your product from the very beginning with the ingredients, flavors, consistency, texture, and taste that perfectly represents your brand. We create a fully customizable thermal process that supports your flavor and ensures shelf stability.
FORMULATION
Formulation begins with an idea.
The more you can tell us about your brand, your customers and mission, the easier it is for us to translate that into a physical product. When working with food, there are limitations to what is physically and chemically possible, which is why it’s imperative we take an accurate and precise appraisal of all the parts and ask the right questions of each ingredient.
Unlike many manufacturers, we don’t require licensing on flavors or raw materials. We believe ingredient autonomy is important. Formulation begins with choosing the right ingredients, not just our ingredients.
THERMAL PROCESS DEVELOPMENT
We ensure safety and shelf stability.
Low acid canned foods and acidified foods require thermal process development to ensure every product is handled and heat processed adequately and safely for shelf stability. We begin this study early on during formulation to create an empirical heating study of your product to determine how it must be pasteurized or sterilized.
Because our Process authority is in house, the heat penetration and temperature distribution study can be done in tandem with finalizing formulas. This speeds up the process of designing and getting your product to market.
Thermal process studies for approved formulas are finalized on the exact equipment that is used for commercial production. It’s critical to know exactly how your product behaves to ensure consumer safety and peace of mind.
SCALABILITY AND PILOT PLANT
We recognize the importance of launching products pragmatically.
Conventional contract manufacturing typically requires brands to pay for large pilot runs and commit to large annual volumes. This approach can make the cost of your new product launch excessive. We have taken a more pragmatic approach at Blackeye Beverage. We have maintained small batch capability to enhance an agile and cost-effective start. This reduces your raw material cost, production cost and the potential for out of code product.
Process engineering: The Blackeye approach allows us to partner with you on development, by utilizing design of experiment or multi variable analysis techniques in real time. We do this early on in the development process, helping you to get to your optimal product faster and with less cost. This process also allows us to simultaneously develop the thermal processing parameters and utilize on pilot samples.
When this work is complete you will have a full production quality product in a shorter time and lower cost. Finally, as you grow your business, we will scale with you. We partner with world class container and ingredient suppliers for consistency and supply chain security. We optimize the process flow with-in house extraction, blending, and production mixing techniques to deliver your brand in the scale you need, when you need it.
COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION
From bench top to commercial scale in 6 months or less.
Whether you need 500 cases or 50,000 cases, every container of your product must be consistent. We also realize that minimum order quantities are historically very high for most food producers, so we decided to always retain small batch capabilities.
We choose to grow and scale a product line with our customers over forcing exorbitant minimums that have a cascade of negative impacts for a channel or brand. All of the steps that lead to commercial production allow our customers to take a product from bench top to commercial scale in 6 months or less.
Address
705 Vandalia Street
St. Paul, Minnesota
55114
Careers
Please visit this page to hear about our latest job openings.