UNL’s Food Processing Center helps entrepreneurs take products from recipe to reality
As Jessi Hoeft passed the towering metal vats, she tapped on each one, sending a vibration through the stainless steel.The scent of tea and peaches began to fill the brewery, and she heard the faint sound of water moving in the vats.
Tapping on the tanks was a secret ritual for Hoeft, the co-owner of kombucha and cold brew company Ensign Beverage in Hastings. She knew a thick, gelatinous culture of bacteria and yeast was interacting with the tea, yet even after 29 years of brewing kombucha, she still found herself wondering: ‘Are you in there? Are you working? Are you alive?’
Jessi Hoeft and her husband Nathan Hoeft opened First Street Brewing Company, which sells beer, in Hastings in 2016. Almost immediately, they saw an opportunity to diversify with non-alcoholic beverages. Jessi Hoeft had been brewing kombucha, a fermented tea containing bacteria probiotics, at home since 1995, so she suggested starting a kombucha company as a sister company to First Street Brewing Company.
“There were a lot of things we had to figure out on our own, because commercial kombucha was just coming onto the market, and we didn't have a lot of people to rely on,” Hoeft said.
That's where the Food Processing Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln came in.
The FPC, located on Nebraska Innovation Campus, is a resource for the food industry and offers services such as food safety testing, product development and sensory evaluation panels. The FPC has 20 staff members, 3 faculty members and 20 student workers that help in the labs, pilot plants and dairy store.
Julie Reiling, the FPC’s senior consultant, said the center has worked with hundreds of clients over their 41 years of service. About half of the FPC’s clients are Nebraska-based, but the center has national and international clients, too.
“We work with everybody from somebody who has an idea and is selling at farmers markets to the very large companies that you would have heard of,” Reiling said.
Established in 1983, UNL’s FPC is the oldest of the few university food processing centers in the U.S., according to Reiling. TheFPC owns equipment like a high pressure processing unit, which only two other university food processing centers have. In the FPC’s pilot plants, companies can make small batches of products to test them out.
The FPC is also home to the only sensory analysis lab in Nebraska, where consumer panels of around 40 to 60 people taste and evaluate companies' products.The participants are employees of the 80 businesses on Nebraska Innovation Campus.
“We've done everything from a sports beverage to pizzas, seasoned french fries, a lot of different baked goods, cottage cheese, soup, ice cream,” Reiling said. “You can almost name about any food product, and we've probably done it in here.”
Hoeft's story with the FPC started in 2015 with the center’s Recipe to Reality class, a one-day seminar which costs $250 and teaches the basics of starting a food business and some of the challenges entrepreneurs could face. One of Hoeft’s friends who worked on Innovation Campus said the class could help her develop her ideas and get connected with people in the food industry.
“I think it's a great place to start if you have an idea and you want to flush it out and you just want to get to know the players of people in the state of Nebraska who can help you make a product,” Hoeft said.
As an entrepreneur who’d launched First Street Brewing company and a soap-making company in Tennessee, Hoeft came prepared. She already had a business plan and customer scope base for Ensign Beverage, which she said probably isn’t typical for most people who take the class. Because of that, it was only two months before the Hoefts were developing their kombucha with the FPC.
The Hoefts had to determine their kombucha’s water profile, bacterial culture for fermentation and sugar and alcohol content. The FPC’s product development lab helped the Hoefts with testing.
“The really big thing that they helped me with was the nutritional panel, like doing sugar testing so that we made sure that we had the correct amount of sugar in there,” Hoeft said.
Hoeft said cost varied depending on the test, and she didn’t know how much she paid in total. Ellie Watts, the FPC’s director, said the center’s pricing structure is flexible and it assesses each client’s needs individually.
“Pricing is dependent upon project parameters, and we offer many discounts for our clients,” Watts said. “We also work closely with state entities to help clients obtain grant opportunities.” Hoeft researched the exact tea she wanted to use, and the couple built a customer base. They also traveled to Long Beach, California, for the Kombucha Brewers International conference and monthly meeting round tables to learn kombucha brewing techniques.
About four years later, in 2019, the Hoefts were done developing their kombucha product. But their work with the FPC is just beginning. The Hoefts are currently working with Dr. Edward Deehan and Dr. Jennifer Auchtung, assistant professors of food science and technology, to research kombucha and the gut biome.
“We're really excited to continue to work with the FPC because we have some things in the works with them that could be game changing for kombucha,” Hoeft said.
Another entrepreneur couple who has worked with FPC is Xiaoqing Xie and her husband, Changmou Xu, both originally from China. Xie and Xu co-founded A+ Berry, which sells antioxidant drinks made from aronia berries.
Xie and Xu worked with aronia berry growers for more than eight years on research projects in UNL’s food science department. Despite Nebraska’s long history of growing aronia berries, Xie said many Midwesterners don’t know much about the fruit.
Known more commonly as “chokeberries,” aronia berries are astringent, which means they taste bitter and can have a dry, puckering mouthfeel. Despite their tart taste, aronia berries are a superfruit rich in antioxidants, according to Xie.
“Aronia berries have the highest antioxidant and anti-inflammatory protection, but the biggest issue is the high amount of polyphenol, which makes them tart,” Xie said.
Aronia berry growers could harvest aronia berries but selling them was difficult because of the taste. Xie said the American Aronia Berry Association asked her husband for help because of his food science expertise in using processes to make food products more attractive and usable for consumers.
Xu’s research focuses on the role of natural compounds in health and flavor, and during their eight years of research in UNL’s Food Science Department, the couple and their colleagues discovered the compounds that gave aronia berries their bitter taste.
Xie and Xu developed a patented technology which is a combination of natural ingredient encapsulation and cold pasteurization techniques. Xie said the technology gives aronia berries a smoother, more palatable taste without sacrificing the health benefits.
Xie and Xu had solved a problem, and now they saw an opportunity: starting an aronia berry business.
Unlike Hoeft, the couple didn’t have any experience starting a business, so they attended training and a workshop through the FPC to develop their business skills. The Nebraska Department of Economic Development gave the couple a $125,000 academic research and development grant to work with the FPC.
The FPC provided quality control to ensure they had the highest quality aronia berries and gave regulation guidance for the nutrition label, website and promotion materials, and they ran tests in the FPC’s labs.
The couple wanted to develop a fresh, healthy product with no preservatives.
“You may find some aronia berry products on the market, like the jam and the jelly, using a lot of sugar to neutralize the taste but which are not healthy,” Xie said.
Xie and Xu used the patent technology they’d developed to hide the berries’ tart taste and make their product stay fresh without preservatives.
If Xie and Xu used heat to kill microorganisms that could spoil their product or cause disease, they would risk killing the antioxidants too, losing their product’s health benefits. Instead of heat, they used the FPC’s high pressure processing unit.
HPP is a food preservation technique that uses intense pressure instead of heat to reduce the number of harmful microorganisms in products, according to the European Food Safety Authority. The products still need to be refrigerated, but HPP extends the shelf life without adding preservatives. The FPC is one of three university food processing centers with an HPP unit, according to Reiling.
“For the product development, it didn't take a long time for us because we had a research project for more than 10 years,” Xie said.
Developing their aronia berry juice product, AroJuice, took about a year. After the juice was developed, they made countless modifications based on consumer feedback during sensory analysis panels. AroJuice is now available in over 120 Hy-Vees across the Midwest.
The couple now lives in Champaign, Illinois, since Xu got a new job. Xie commutes between Champaign and Lincoln. A+ Berry is located on the second floor of UNL’s Food Science Department.
A+ Berry and Ensign Beverage are just two of the Nebraska companies that have worked with the FPC to develop their products. According to Reiling, the FPC has collaborated with many recognizable companies like Yasso frozen yogurt bars, but due to client confidentiality agreements, most of them can’t be disclosed.
Reiling said the Nebraska Legislature set money aside to start the FPC, hoping to boost Nebraska’s agribusiness and entrepreneurship. The center’s state funding varies from year to year.
“We're here to help grow,” Reiling said. “We're here for Nebraska companies, and we're here for anybody who needs help to grow their food business. Whether that be that entrepreneur, whether that be that small business that's just looking for that next step, or the larger ones that just need a helping hand.”
Full story and additional photos >>
by Maddie Hansen | Dec 10, 2024