When a tiny change topples food quality: Lessons from the lab and factory floor
28 August 2025 | Elena Sharma, Food and Drink Science Team Lead
Have you ever experienced that moment where you swear nothing has changed… yet suddenly your product isn’t what it used to be?
It happens more often than you might think in the food industry. A snack that is suddenly too soft. A sauce that is too runny or has a grainy texture. A cereal that is going stale weeks before it should. And sometimes, that “small” tweak - a new supplier, a slightly different processing step, a storage shift—has quietly set off a chain reaction you never saw coming.
With ingredient and energy prices climbing, it is understandable why manufacturers might look for ways to cut costs: switching to a lower-cost raw material supplier, adjusting production steps for efficiency, or finding savings in packaging. These moves can work wonders for the budget… but they can also nudge a delicate balance out of place, leading to unexpected (and expensive) quality problems.
...unless you know exactly which ingredients and process parameters are key to your product quality, some of those shifts will go unnoticed… until consumers notice.
The domino effect of small changes
In theory, ingredient and process specifications should protect you from these risks. In practice, they often only partially control the variables that matter most for product quality. When you change suppliers, dozens of tiny factors - moisture content, particle size, oxidative stability, even the way raw materials were stored before delivery - might suddenly shift. And unless you know exactly which ingredients and process parameters are key to your product quality, some of those shifts will go unnoticed… until consumers notice.
That’s where Campden BRI comes in.
Playing food detective
Our Food and Drink Science team are often called in as the “first responders” when something has gone wrong. Sometimes, it is urgent: a product withdrawal, multiple consumer complaints, or a sudden spike in out-of-spec batches. Other times, it is a subtle but concerning trend. By combining scientific know-how with on-the-floor observation and structured root cause analysis, we help brands not only fix today’s problem but protect against tomorrow’s surprises.
Our approach is part science, part detective work:
- Scoping the scene: We start with an initial call to understand the problem and its business impact.
- Gathering the clues: We request key documents - HACCP plans, recipes, raw material specs, packaging details - not to check compliance, but to uncover hidden weak points.
- Walking the Gemba: (That’s the Japanese term for “the actual place” where value is created - think factory floor, QA lab, storage rooms). We walk through the process, talk to operators, QA staff, and supervisors, and watch how things really happen.
- Connecting the dots: Using Lean Six Sigma tools—like fishbone diagrams and the 5 Whys - we brainstorm with the client’s cross-functional team, zeroing in on the root causes.
- Testing the theories: Meanwhile, our lab puts product samples through microstructural, chemical, microscopy and shelf-life analysis to validate the findings.
When the stakes are high, we can turn this around fast - sometimes in a matter of days - to get control of the problem before it grows.
In less urgent and less business-critical cases, the entire root cause analysis (RCA) can be conducted online following the basic structure of an initial scoping meeting, documents review, virtual brainstorming with a cross functional team in parallel to product testing in our microstructure lab and reporting of the findings.
A good example of our work in this area is provided by the following case study project, which we progressed in 2024.
In this example, a new client contact reached out to us requesting urgent assistance with early shelf-life rancidity onset in cereal products. After an initial call, we reviewed a list of documents (HACCP plan, SOPs, product recipes, specific raw materials and primary packaging specifications, etc.) and formulated a preliminary hypothesis prior to our site visit.
We began the site visit with a presentation explaining the science of oils and fats, while discussing several rancidity pathways that can occur in cereal products.
Following the science presentation, we conducted a product, storage, packaging and QA lab Gemba walk.
Next, we spoke with operators and QA staff to understand their ways of working and information flows in the organisation, following up with a 3-hour brainstorming session with a cross functional team to discuss the findings and review further documentation.
As with any classic quality audit, we then took around 30 minutes to align on key findings and root causes, before presenting these findings to the leadership team. At this point we were already able to propose several corrective measures related to ingredients and process and suggested further product sample testing to guide the re-development of several recipes that were the most affected by rancidity.
Helping you maintain quality throughout your food journey
We hope you found the above case study example helpful in giving you a better idea of how we can support you in this area, and the typical steps we would take when conducting this type of investigation to help you maintain food product quality.
The use of the root cause analysis technique is a major part of this work, and it is an area that we are currently developing further within our wider portfolio, which also includes many other services across food product development.
If you have any questions about our technical root cause analysis service or anything else to do with food and drink science, we are also offering a free 20-minute consultation with Elena.
How can we help?
If you would like support in the wider area of product development or food quality, contact our team to find out how we can help.
Want to read more about our expertise in NPD and reformulation?
Why not take a look at our most recent collection of articles relating to this area.
