Coming up with new products

The process for coming up with a new product comes with either a flavor idea, seeing a recipe somewhere or a date. Take the upcoming Easter holiday. Which we started prepping for in January. We first decide what we’re going to offer, the ideas were seemingly obvious, between bunnies and eggs you’d think it’d be easy to come up with a concept. But there’s a lot that goes into each decision. If we were to get a bunny mold, would it be too intricate that the marshmallow wouldn’t show the details of the mold once set, or if we did an egg, how would we decorate it to show that it’s an Easter egg?

We started with the bunny molds. Thinking we wanted something to do with chocolate, we came up chocolate, but not necessarily wanting to do a completely immersed chocolate bunny, we tested out a few variations, between a very detailed mold and a more simple mold. We had to find a mold that was deep enough to hold a substantial amount of marshmallow and allow for any additional decorations we’d want to add. Once we found a couple bunny molds, we tested what the final product would look like, we tried, a plain marshmallows, we tried, two flavors in one mold, we tried adding chocolate to the mold, we tried dipping just the back in chocolate and we tried dipping the whole thing in chocolate. Nothing satisfied us, the mold was too deep, the detail was either too intricate or too bland and for some reason whatever we did with the chocolate it didn’t turn out just right.

So we moved on to eggs. And we again looked for egg molds, some were pre-detailed some were super large, some very small. We tried, several things, we tried swirling two flavors together to give a marbled dyed egg look, we tried, painting the inside of the mold with color to decorate it before adding the marshmallow, we tried painting the inside mold with colored chocolate before adding the marshmallow, we tried dipping the end egg in chocolate after the marshmallow was made and we tried painting the finished egg with colors after it was released from the mold and painting it with colored chocolate. Nothing seemed just right. Until we came up with a more simple idea of just doing a perfectly tempered plain chocolate and decorating the chocolate with colored chocolate swirls and sprinkles (so we said no to the pre-decorated molds) and yes to a slight artistic flair.

We also tried out a printed chocolate backing to give the egg a fun, easter vibe and

we really liked the results so we decided to add that to our eggs also.

Then came the idea of flavors, we liked the idea of doing a white outside with a colored inside, kind of like a yolk of an egg, but we weren’t sure what we wanted to do. We tested an all vanilla marshmallow, and while good, we craved flavor, so we tested a few other options. Strawberry is one of our most popular flavors so we made a strawberry jam and we tested it with vanilla and with strawberry bases and it was good, but we didn’t think the marshmallows would last as long with those options than with another, so we tried a strawberry ganache in the middle and that blew our socks off it was so good we stopped testing the strawberry flavors and focused on other options. We went through everything from caramel, banana and caramel, vanilla and caramel, different types of caramel from runny to gooey and ultimately decided against the caramel, it was just too sweet and didn’t add enough to the overall flavor of the marshmallow. We tried dragon fruit, lemon and chocolate ganaches. The dragon fruit ganache didn’t take on much flavor and wasn’t good enough to merit being included in the overall flavor profile. The lemon and chocolate ganaches were really tasty, but that too had a ton of experimentation, from lemon peel granules, to dried lemon and semisweet or bittersweet chocolate.

The process for making marshmallows means it must take several hours to dry before you can eat it, so this took months of our time. And we can confidently say that we went through extensive enough testing to be able to offer our customers the absolute best options there is.

This is just the testing process for Easter, we go through similar testing for each and every product we put out, we research the best ingredients and processes to ensure that we’re passing the best options onto our customers and we do everything we can to ensure their enjoyment of the product.

So after all the flavor experimentation we had to remake the final flavors once again so we could get some pictures of everything to be able to put it up on our website and post on social media.

We’re proud of our Easter flavors and excited to go on to the next experimentation process.