A recipe and a product are different things. A recipe works once, in one kitchen, made by the person who wrote it. A product has to work every time, made by people who have never met the chef, on equipment that behaves nothing like a pan.
The gap between the two is where most food products lose what made them worth making. Something gets substituted for shelf life, a process gets shortened for throughput, and the version that reaches a shelf is a diminished relative of the one that was approved.
Who it's for:
Food brands, manufacturers, private label and retail ranges.
What's Included
- ✦Concept and recipe development
- ✦Bench trials and sensory iteration
- ✦Yield, cost and margin modelling
- ✦Scale-up and production-ready specifications
- ✦Ingredient and supplier sourcing
- ✦Range extension for existing products
Development on a bench, then against a spec
Work starts the way a chef works: build the thing until it is genuinely good, without worrying yet about whether it can be made at volume. A product that was compromised before it was ever right will not be rescued later.
Then it goes the other way. Yield tests on commercial ingredients rather than retail ones. Cost per unit at realistic volumes. What happens to texture and flavour after a week, a month, a heat cycle, a freeze. Which steps are genuinely load-bearing and which exist only because that is how a chef would do it in a restaurant.
The deliverable is a specification a production team can execute — quantities, sequence, tolerances, process parameters and the reasoning behind the choices that matter, so nobody optimises away the step that was doing the work.
Where Italian expertise is the point
Australian retail is full of Italian-labelled product made by people who have never eaten the original. It usually shows in the same places: the acidity, the fat, the salt level, and a texture built for a long shelf life rather than for eating.
Chef Gabriele trained in Palermo and cooks these products daily. For sauces, pasta, preserves, bakery and dessert lines, that is the difference between a product that reads as authentic to someone who knows and one that reads as an approximation.
Range extension and reformulation
Not every brief is a new product. Often the job is a second and third SKU that share a production line with an existing hero, or a reformulation forced by an ingredient that has become expensive, unavailable or commercially awkward.
Reformulation is the harder of the two, because the target is a product customers already have an opinion about. The work is identifying which attributes are actually doing the recognition — usually fewer than the brief assumes — and protecting those while everything else moves.
How the engagement runs
Product work is scoped as a project with defined stages rather than an ongoing retainer: brief and feasibility, bench development, tasting and iteration, then scale-up support with your manufacturer or co-packer.
Most of it does not require Chef Gabriele to be in your building, so this line runs Australia-wide. Bench sessions happen in Sydney; tastings, iteration and factory trials are scheduled around your production calendar. NDAs are standard.
Common questions
Do you work with manufacturers or only with brands?
Both, though the brief differs. Brands usually want a product developed and a manufacturer found. Manufacturers usually want an existing product fixed or a range extended within a line's constraints.
Can you work with our existing co-packer?
Yes, and it's usually better. Developing against your co-packer's real equipment and minimum runs from the start avoids the common failure where an approved bench product turns out to be unmakeable at their scale.
Do you handle labelling, food safety and compliance?
No — that is specialist regulatory work and you should engage a food-safety consultant for it. Chef Gabriele develops the product and the process, and works alongside whoever handles your compliance.