As a gluten free facility, how do we put our money where YOUR mouth is?
Last month, we explored the many ways that InBite can offer support during the copacking or private label process. This time we would like to share more on just how we ensure that we deliver on the promises we make to the gluten free, kosher & vegan community.
Choosing the Right Ingredients: Not Our First Rodeo & Sometimes Not our First Choice!
At InBite, creating a formula and determining which ingredients will best fit that formula is like producing a piece of functional art. The top priority is quality and avoiding specific elements like gluten, preservatives and animal byproducts. But what about other important factors during production? For instance, you can have the perfect combination of ingredients for nutritional function and even taste, but what about the consistency of the product and being able to produce the same quality, size and texture for EACH & EVERY batch? This is where Ana & Giancarlo’s expertise come in!
For InBite, choosing ingredients in a smart way is vital in controlling consistency and quality during production, but also the key to controlling costs during the development of new formulas. Over the years, we have been able to hone in on how certain ingredients can be attractive to include, but consequently affect the texture or shelf life of your final product. This is why sometimes the most common ingredients used for gluten free and vegan products are actually NOT our first choice. Everything we have learned during our trial and error phases has actually become the guiding light for how we approach every new formula. This is what helps us stay at the forefront of producing the best gluten free and vegan cakes, cookies, biscottis, buns, breads, granola and muffins!
Our innovative way of approaching recipes and production has also paved the way in creating partnerships and alluring companies wanting to test the quality of their products against others used in gluten-free and vegan facilities. At InBite, we get to test all kinds of “replacers'' to determine which is going to work best for the outcome we are looking for. For example, egg “replacers” are vital in vegan recipes but very specific to how they react with other ingredients; so what works for one product may completely ruin the texture of another. We can not stress enough the importance of choosing the right ingredients, but what about choosing the right partners or vendors?
A Vital Step in Upholding the Value of your Ingredients: How Partnerships Can Affect Your Progression.
For a large portion of our client base, even trace amounts of gluten can trigger adverse reactions ranging in severity with a chance of becoming a life or death situation for some. Therefore, using high quality ingredients only matters when you ensure high quality testing for gluten presence and enforce company policies to prevent potential cross-contamination. This is why choosing the right vendor for your ingredients is just as important as choosing the right partner for your testing.
Recently, our founders had the opportunity to train one-on-one with experts from Romer Labs, a leading provider in diagnostic solutions for the agricultural, food and feed industry. Their testing capabilities cover all the bases we look for including mycotoxins, microorganisms, food allergens, gluten, GMO and other food contaminants. By ensuring high quality and consistent testing at InBite, we uphold the value of all the ingredients we choose from the beginning and products that we make with them. We know our ingredients are only as good as our testing protocol and that is why we have a deep appreciation for companies like Romer Labs, who provide extensive resources and direction in upholding the tough standards that we put on ourselves.
The industry standard is: anything advertised as “gluten-free” must contain fewer than 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten. At InBite, however, we take your gut health seriously and set our standards high making sure that testing conducted on our products and facility are found to be fewer than 5 ppm! Not only do we test every batch but we also periodically send our samples to third-party testing to ensure random checks of the facility and anything that we might produce.
This process and our efforts in making sure we deliver on all of our promises IS how we put our money where YOUR mouth is! With InBite, you can rest assured that you are getting everything you are looking for with high-quality ingredients and a high-quality process right from the start.
To learn more about our partner Romer Labs, visit https://www.romerlabs.com/.