Hi there! I’m Heather, and for my first post I wanted to tell you a bit about me and why I’m starting this blog.
After working as a food scientist for 20 years, I had a baby and decided to be a stay at home mom. Yes, I am an old first-time mom if you are doing the math, LOL. My son Rex is an absolute joy and you will be seeing plenty of pictures of his adorable face. There two main reasons I am starting this blog.
- First, I miss the food industry and having a place to talk about it.
- Second, I see so much misinformation spread between moms about food. It worries me, and I need a place for my voice to be heard and to speak the truth.
There will be a variety of information covered in this blog. First, I’ll be sharing insights on food for kids and some of my experiences as a food scientist. Second, I will do some myth busting of information spreading over the internet. Lastly, I will include some kid friendly kitchen experiments and favorite recipes.
When you tell someone you’re a food scientist, you get a lot of interesting responses. So, you’re like a chef? So you’re a dietitian? Oh, you probably don’t eat anything knowing what you know! None of these are true.
Although I’ve had some culinary training, I am definitely not a chef. I took numerous nutritional classes to get my degree and frequently worked toward specific nutritional requirements for products, but I am not a dietitian. Dietitians study the relationship between food and the body. Food scientists focus on the food itself.
What does a food scientist do? There are many different routes you can take with a food science degree. Some graduates go into quality control, ensuring that your food is safe and of high quality. Some go into research and may spend their days creating new ingredients or learning new chemical properties of food. I specialized in product development. This means I worked on creating new food products and improving existing ones. I created the formulas (recipes), and tested them over and over again until they were perfect for taste, texture, and aroma. I was also the one responsible for that long list of ingredients you might see on a package. I assure you, every ingredient has its purpose! I’ve made products that are very nutritious, and many that are not. When it was time to produce a new product, I would travel to the manufacturing plant to make sure it was made to specification. A lot of things can go wrong when you scale up a product from 1 pound to 100 pounds and then a 5000 pound batch.
Here a few of the things I have worked on over the years:
- Freeze dried fruit and vegetable products.
- Healthy Choice, Marie Callender’s, Michelina’s, and private label frozen meals. Private label is a store brand, like Great Value at WalMart or Archer Farms at Target.
- Yeast Extract – an ingredient used in all sorts of products to enhance the flavor.
- Private labels condiments and sauces (BBQ sauce, salsa, hot sauce, Jams, etc).
- Private label dry macaroni and cheese mixes, flavored rice mixes, and pasta salad mixes.
Here are a few things to know about me. I am a “non-crunchy” mom who:
- Is ok with feeding her kid “processed foods”.
- Is ok with GMOs
- Does not buy organic unless it is the only option for a product
I’ll be sharing more on the above in upcoming blogs, so stay tuned! If you have a topic you would like to see me write about, please contact me!