Q to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2018 and Laura's committed herself to creating a European style infant formula for the U.S. market. But unlike most food startups, you can't just mix up formula powder in your home kitchen and test it on people you know. Yeah, how do you do that? You got on a panel of babies.
A So there's these, essentially, kitchens, micro-kitchens, that you can work with, and they're innovation centers, and a lot of big companies would turn to them and say, I have this idea, I want to go formulate it, but they don't have a pilot plant or a pilot kitchen to go do it in. And this is, this is where the money went, right? So as soon as we got to a place of having this formulation in hand, it was a spreadsheet. It was a spreadsheet of numbers and a list of ingredients. I would then drive down to the Innovation Center, which was about an hour outside of San Francisco, and I would meet with the team there who were just a big, beautiful team of nutrition scientists. They would go order the ingredients, and we would work in a lab, essentially, to formulate the product so that we could do some taste testing and sensory analysis. But one thing to note, unlike other CPG products, infant formula has to be made to Under a commercially ready manufacturing facility.
AI assessment note: “we would work in a lab, essentially, to formulate the product”