“What the heck takes so long?!”
Since you asked, it takes approximately 96 steps to bring a product from ideation to saturating your pancakes. There’s naming convention, packaging selection, ingredient sourcing, spec sheet builds, material onboarding… plus 91 other tasks to check off the list.
Since winning this year’s New Flavor Contest, our flavor alchemists have been hard at work to turn your vanilla bean dreams into a reality – but flavor development is just one small part of launching a new product.
What Comes Next?
We won’t bore you with all 96 of the nitty gritty details… but here’s a peek into a few of the big-picture items on our to do list that we’ll be sharing over the coming months:
CONCEPT
It was all hands on deck with thousands of fans sharing their input, nominating ideas, and voting on this new flavor. Great work, team! ✔
SOURCING
Luckily, we just wrapped up another successful sugaring season so our supply of Vermont maple is secured. Now, we have vanilla bean samples arriving from around the globe to begin our search for the perfect flavor profile… stay tuned!
CERTIFICATION
Once we’ve landed on a formula, the paperwork begins. Our Quality Assurance department undertakes rigorous food safety testing and completes third-party certifications like Kosher and USDA Organic.
DESIGN
The flavor isn’t the only perfectly-curated piece of the puzzle… Each bottle has unique label art hand drawn by a local illustrator (last year, we put the Salted Caramel label designs to a vote); plus photography, recipe development, product descriptions, and more.
PRODUCTION
After months of hard work, it’s finally time for production: each batch is infused, bottled, and labeled in-house at our Fairfax production facility, then carefully packed and shipped out for delivery.