All natural

Foods by George LLC, Mahwah, N.J., creates a variety of baked products including gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free and even corn-free. Established in 1991, the company designed a Web site that makes it easy for customers to sort foods according to the ingredients they need or wish to avoid. Foods by George sells brownies, muffins, cakes and a pizza that won best new product introduction at the 2005 Natural Products Expo East.

Company Owner George Chookazian says that keeping his ingredient selection fresh and all-natural helps create great tasting foods. He avoids any ingredients that use additives, to the point of ordering and using fresh whole eggs or egg whites without the common whipping agents processors normally include.

He strives to make every product at his company as close to the original wheat-based version as possible. “I've been asked why I don't make brown rice crust. People don't typically go into the pizzeria to ask for a whole wheat crust pizza. Our crust is crispy, not grainy or doughy.”

One of his challenges is delivering a consistent product without using artificial or chemically-modified ingredients. “That also means there is less tolerance for error, so you have to have tight quality controls, specifications and parameters,” Chookazian notes.

The right modifications

Companies entering the gluten-free or allergen-free market should consider dedicated facilities for production to avoid the danger of contamination. Whole Foods built an 8,000-sq.-ft. dedicated facility in North Carolina for its entrée into gluten-free baking. Kinnikinnick Foods Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, got its start in 1991, creating gluten-free baked foods by hand. Today, this privately held firm employs 160 people and operates two automated manufacturing facilities of 150,000 sq. ft. each.

The company started paying more attention to allergen-free formulating in 1998 in response to a customer's call related to her son's autism, notes Jay Bigam, executive vice president, Kinnikinnick. At that time, when the company was much smaller, it started GFCF (gluten-free, casein-free) Tuesdays. On Mondays, the staff would complete an allergen cleanup of machinery, and one Tuesday per month create dairy-free, gluten-free baked foods. Demand grew and in 2001, the company started reformulating its products to be dairy-free. As Bigam points out, “A lot of celiacs also have issues with lactose, so that was a fairly natural fit for us.” The company also is peanut-free and 99 percent dairy-free.

The company operates an in-house lab that runs the most sensitive r5 monoclonal antibody test, which detects a tolerance range within 4 ppm. The Canadian and U.S. governments recommend a company have no more than 20 ppm of gluten in order to achieve gluten-free labeling.

Kinnikinnick currently is working on removing soy from its products. “Not an easy thing to do,” Bigam says. “It is in everything, and it has great functional properties in gluten-free foods.” But he draws the line at product quality. If an ingredient cannot be successfully substituted, he keeps the formulation the same. “Taste is paramount.”

One of the company's recent successes was its introduction of Kinnitoos®, a classic sandwich cookie with white filling that is a gluten-free equivalent of an Oreo™. “For us, the big trick was not just mouthfeel but getting it to work in rotary dies, stamping out the shapes and getting a release from the equipment,” Bigam says.

Because of the extremely sticky nature of gluten-free dough formulations, machineability is always a challenge. Kinnikinnick purchased an automated line that makes 200 dozen donuts an hour. “When the people from the manufacturing company walked in, they said ‘we'll have you running in three days,’ and two weeks later they left scratching their heads,” Bigam says. “It took us six months to develop a good-tasting formula that also works in the machine.”

Another recent product introduction that posed a huge challenge was frozen waffles that are both dairy- and soy-free and cook up light and fluffy. “We have a long list of ingredients we cannot use that normally would be included in a standard waffle formulation,” Bigam says. “For us to develop a waffle that runs on a high-speed production line that tastes good is personally, for me, something to be proud of. No one has ever done gluten-free waffles the way we have.”

That sense of pride, coupled with a tasty product that lives up to consumer expectations is what produces repeat business whether creating conventional or specialty baked products.