Custom Food Manufacturing Solutions

Meeting Challenges In Food Ingredient Manufacturing

Yost Foods specializes in custom food manufacturing solutions that help solve our customers’ food ingredient challenges and meet specific requirements for flavor, consistency, and stocking lead times. We strive to provide cost-effective solutions for all of our custom food ingredient applications to help our customers gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Our custom food ingredient solutions include:

• Marinades
• Bases and concentrates
• Purees
• Dry seasonings
• Concentrated sauces
• Finished sauces
• Snack seasonings
• Organic
• Non-GMO
• Vegan
• RTE (Ready to eat)
• WIP (Work in process)
• And many more

Our Work In Process capabilities allow our customers to outsource a specific element of their overall product, for example a spice blend for a salad dressing, helping to free up their own resources with a cost-effective solution.

We can also provide Clean Label solutions to satisfy consumer demand. Be sure to read our article on Innovative Clean Label Solutions to learn more.

Our Custom Food Manufacturing Process

Our custom food manufacturing solutions are a highly collaborative process with our customers, and follow these steps:

Needs Assessment: The process begins with a comprehensive needs assessment to understand what our customers need help with. Is it a new product? Is it a unique flavor profile? Are they currently buying at a premium and are looking for a more cost effective solution? Are there consistency problems? Lead time issues? The team at Yost Foods fully explores how best we can help our customers, and we then align our resources to meet the challenges and provide a winning solution.

Product Development: Once we understand the problems our customers need to solve, our product development team will work closely with our customer’s development team to co-develop a solution and ensure it is what they are looking for at a cost-effective price. Our product development lab can provide samples from 4 oz. to a gallon or several pounds for initial sampling and testing.

Production Trial: After benchtop approval, the process moves to a small trial production run in a pilot plant or scale-up facility where we can do scale up volumes of the custom food application to ensure a smooth transition from the development lab to full scale production.

Full Production: When final approval of the custom food application is achieved, we can move to full scale production and we negotiate stocking agreements to ensure we have the shortest lead times available for our customer.

We Offer A Wide Variety of Resources for Custom Food Applications

At Yost Foods we take great pride in the resources we have to offer our customers for custom food applications. Our technical group consists of product development and technical applications teams including food scientists and technicians, Johnson & Wales trained chefs, and a commercialization team to make sure production rollout is smooth and efficient.

For hard to source flavors or ingredients, we can utilize our extensive network and years of experience to find alternative ingredients that have similar flavor profiles to extend the use of the hard to source ingredient, so that our customers can still make a desired label claim. We are highly skilled at finding workarounds to solve problems of ingredient availability to help meet our customers’ goals.

Yost Foods: Your Ideal Partner For Custom Food Manufacturing

What sets Yost Foods apart in the custom food manufacturing industry is our ability to align our resources to the benefit of our customers. If you have a technical question, you can reach out directly to our food scientists and technicians. Production question? Rest assured you can communicate with the best person to answer your question. We allow this visibility for our customers to reach out and communicate with all of our resources based on the questions they need addressed and answered, without funneling all questions through a single contact or department. This approach makes for a highly efficient development process because everyone is on the same team working together for the customer throughout the entire process.

Additionally, Yost Foods is ideally positioned to handle your custom food applications because we are small enough to put a lot of emphasis on specific projects, yet large enough to scale up to larger production requirements.

Ready to start a conversation? We look forward to learning about your custom food manufacturing challenges and co-developing a winning solution. Contact us today or call 330.273.4420.

Yost Foods: Making sense of all your food manufacturing ingredient needs.