This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Science, innovation, and food entrepreneurship with Mike Gabel.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Mike Gabel: Not a lot of things are going to stick. You’re going to have to kiss a lot of frogs to make sure that it’s going to work, but then you pass it off to somebody and you can kind of see the fruits of bringing in something new and very special to make people’s lives better and more nutritious or whatever asset that looks like. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado. 

On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus. I’m joined today by Mike Gable, the director of the Food Innovation Center here at CSU Spurr, which has the goal of supporting food innovators through various services and by creating a place for their ideas to be fostered and grow. Mike is a second generation Colorado State University grad in food science and human nutrition after a master’s in food engineering from University of California Davis. He started his 20 plus year career with roles in product development, quality systems strategy and portfolio management in a variety of food businesses. He has led innovation teams at Windsor Foods, ConAgra Foods, and recently at Barilla where he spent five years at their headquarters in Parma, Italy. Welcome, Mike. 

Mike Gabel: Thanks so much for having me. Jocelyn. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Italy sounds like an okay place to be. 

Mike Gabel: It’s not too bad. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Alright, well we’ll get to that. But first I want to talk a little bit about your work now here at CSU Spur. So tell me a little bit about the Food Innovation Center. 

Mike Gabel: I think it can be best sum to buy our mission, which is really to support any type of food entrepreneur innovator of any shape and size. We focused mostly on our smaller entrepreneurs and so these are people looking to get their grandmother’s recipe onto shelf or they have a brilliant idea of some health problem they had and they just want to get it out to the rest of the people that are maybe suffering from the same ailment. And so we help them with a variety of services. That’s mostly our product development services and also our sensory services and then a variety of spaces and so we have three processing labs and then the commercial kitchen and the bottom floor of Terra here at Spur. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So can you tell us a little bit more about who some of those clients are? You mentioned someone who’s thinking about their grandmother’s pasta sauce or something like that, but who are some of the folks who have been coming and who would you like to see come? 

Mike Gabel: A lot of them are people in state and also people out of state. And so we actually get a lot of clients coming from California, from Austin, from a lot of different places. They’re coming to us saying, we have an idea, maybe I’ve launched brands before. I’ve done this where I understand marketing and sales, but I need a food scientist. I need someone that’ll break this down and help me through some of the technical challenges. And that’s where we shine. And so I’ll talk about a few clients that we’ve already launched. Some are amia, this John Katz, he’s out of Austin. He was an amazing person. He said, I’ve suffered from migraines my whole life. I want a product that doesn’t trigger any of those. So there’s a lot of different ingredients. Their ingredients are not served, different things. And so we created a bar for him. 

We had a couple, Chris and Jenny actually out of Texas also. They were doing a chicken chip. They saw this was a South Korean product that they’d been familiar with, launched. It is looking great. Another couple out of California, they were doing a sports performance gel and like a jelly, just like a gobar or something. They said, we want it more natural, have a lot more of these adaptogens things that really kind of help in the performance. So we’ve just seen a lot of variety of products coming out and so just some fun things coming out of our food innovation center recently. Okay. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I have to go back to the chicken chip. Say more about what a chicken chip 

Mike Gabel: Is. No, it’s just so a very thinly sliced piece of chicken that’s been dehydrated, so it’s not almost a jerky. Jerky is a little bit more chewy, so this is very crispy. So you can actually have that. They were actually looking at more of your gym going people, so a high protein chip that just had a lot of great seasoning on it. So just something you could snack on versus a potato chip. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, and I think that gets at part of what you were saying around how the Food Innovation Center is centered, if I can use that word twice in one sentence around things like nutrition or different taste profiles or desire around ingredients like the person who had migraines. Is that part of what the food science industry is looking at and is this one of, are these some of the trends that you’re seeing? It’s around health that’s around ingredients, it’s around and whether health could be something like, listen, I only want to eat protein because I’m an athlete, or the migraine example. Talk to us a little bit about some of the trends in food science there. 

Mike Gabel: Absolutely. So what we see a lot, like I mentioned before is that we have a lot more people that are looking towards solving a gap where they’re looking at the trigger free foods to eliminate migraines. We have another couple that we worked with, one of our first clients that we had, they had some health issues in their life, an uncle that was really suffering through diabetes and said, we need to cut out sugar. And so they actually created a keto snack mix or mug cakes and different bakery items. And so you see them filling this niche of different needs either for health or for a lot of it really is trying to give back to the community and really kind of come around food. I think we can all kind of appreciate that food really is something that centers us and brings us together as a community. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. And I think that takes a couple of different forms, at least in my experience. One is the foods that we all are used to eating and grew up eating and the experiences we have around growing up eating those foods and the memories that we have associated with them. And then I think there’s also this really interesting thing around coming together around foods that are different. You mentioned something like the chicken chip was inspired by a Korean version, and so we are so lucky I think as a person who loves food of all different sorts to live in a time when we have access to all of these foods from different cultures as well as the ones we grew up with that might be from part of our home culture. So what are you seeing there? Is there a lot more sort of fusion of different styles and cultural influences in the foods that are coming to you but also just in general? I 

Mike Gabel: Think so. I think there’s a lot of people that said, I found this recipe when I was backpacking through Europe. I found some inspiration from a product that we’ve seen overseas. There’s a lot of people that really want a very different experiential experience with their food and so they want to try something a little bit different. They say, I see this and I really enjoy this type of food. It just has a lot of sugar or some ingredients that I don’t want. So I think I can do that better than somebody else. Or I see that probiotics or different gut health is really coming on the scene. I think we can take this product that I love that doesn’t really have any benefit from it, add some probiotics and it’ll just be like I get a two for one. I enjoy eating this, plus I get some gut health to it with it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Okay. I think that starts to steer us toward a little bit more in depth discussion about food science. So I want to pick your brain a little bit about what food science actually is. What are some of the aspects of food product development that you would say are squarely food science or how would you describe food science to someone who didn’t know that those two words could go together? 

Mike Gabel: Sure. And this is one of the things that I always laugh. If you go and you Google and you do an image search of food scientist, they always show somebody in a white lab coach looking through a microscope with a whole pepper and a tomato on there. Or there’s this one that I laugh at all the time. It’s actually someone with a syringe like injecting like a tomato. And I go, this is not food science at all. And I don’t know, as a food scientist in my career for the last 20 years, I’ve never used a microscope. It’s just one of those things. So for the most part we’re doing what we need to do. So if you think about a chef or a home cook, they’re following a recipe. They’re trying to make a food product that don’t want to enjoy us as food scientists, we’re usually working more in the consumer packaged good space, so the CPG space. 

And in that you have a lot more variables that you have to focus on. So you’re usually preparing a food that someone’s going to consume later on, whether that be weeks or months or years. And so how do you preserve it? You have to get the right nutritionals. There’s a lot of people saying, all right, I need this to have low sodium, I need this to have ingredients that might be banned by Whole Foods. And so we have a lot of clients saying, we just want this to follow here, or we’re talking about even a natural flavor. I don’t want any flavors on there. So we have to naturally get that flavor in there. So a lot of that is just working through a lot of those constraints and variables to have a product that tastes good after a certain amount of time and look at the regulations too, making sure it’s safe. 

So there’s a lot of different aspects that we’re balancing. So yes, you can have an amazing recipe, but it might not taste good. After two weeks it might become very stale and none of it’s black magic. A lot of it’s just very centered in science. And so we’re just using specific ingredients or specific techniques, specific processing to get there. And a lot of it still, most of the things we do has been done in a household kitchen. You could do it out of your own kitchen. We just have access or understanding of how to best preserve it or how to best make sure that that flavor still is there after six months. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And that preservation is often things that we’re very familiar with, like canning or Oh yeah, jarring or drying. 

Mike Gabel: All of those are things that we’ve been using for hundreds of years. And so yeah, a lot of it’s the thermal processing. So when we say thermal processing, it’s just heating it up. So pasteurization sounds, but it really is just bringing it to a boil or freezing. We all know about freezing or dehydration, so there’s not a lot of technologies we’re using out there that are that crazy. And there’s some things that are great that like high pressure processing, so that’s just essentially you’re squeezing something tight. So a lot of the hummus out there, a lot of the refrigerated products, they won’t last for a couple of days, but if you high pressure process them, you just put ’em in a big vessel and then you squeeze ’em and that actually deactivates a lot of the spoilage microbes and there are any pathogens too. And so it’s just new ways that we’re getting to have people enjoy their foods in a safer condition. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So let’s talk about Twinkies. 

Mike Gabel: Okay, 

Jocelyn Hittle: Famously last forever. How 

Mike Gabel: There’s not so much to it. I think there’s the cleanliness to it. I mean I think they’ve been all a baked good, will stay good for a long time and the feeling and it’s not your traditional feeling that you’d make at home. And so there’s a lot of stabilizers and things that keep it fresh for longer than you would expect. And still they don’t last forever. 

Jocelyn Hittle: They don’t of course, but it is sort of the mythology around them. Right? 

Mike Gabel: Yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So can we talk a little bit about a day in the life for you then? So this better understanding of food science is really helpful. Let’s talk a little bit about the Food Innovation Center, how it functions as you are supporting these companies in developing these new food products. What’s a day in the life for you? 

Mike Gabel: So I work with a lot of clients onboarding initially just try to get what they’re up to, what they need their help with, whether it be building a product from scratch or we just need a shelf life test, we need to know how long our product’s going to last on shelf or just some basic testing or a lot of the times that we’re talking about our sensory. So lemme talk about our team real quick and just so you can understand this. So we have two food scientists. We just brought in a new food scientist last, actually the beginning of this month. So we have Kate Clark who is our senior food scientist. She’s amazing. She has a background in fermented food, so sourdough and chocolate. So she’s a rock star. And then we have Rachel Waller who is our junior food scientist. And so she’s brought in, has a brewing background and so a lot of great things. 

So they usually take on any of those smaller clients that are saying, yes, I have my grandmother’s recipe, I have whatever else, this great idea. So they’ll run ’em through and build out that product. We usually work towards what we call a minimum viable product. So getting the working prototype that they could take to somebody if they want to self-produce it, that we have the recipe, they have all the different nutritional targets, they work through getting the right suppliers and ingredients for them so they understand how to build this product at rough cost and kind of build all that out so that they have the tools and resources to either self-produce it in a commissary kitchen, a commercial kitchen, or to take to a co-packer to do it on a large scale. So that’s kind of the food science team. Martha Calbert, she runs our sensory program. 

So sensory is all about taste testing. This is really a tool that’s used by a lot of bigger companies just to understand if their product’s market ready, does it taste right, does it have too much salt? Is it sparking joy? And so there’s a lot of things that she does. And so this could be a focus group talking to people and saying, we have this concept. What do you think about this? Or we have them sit in our sensory booths that we have here in Tara and so you open up and they receive two or three different samples. Do they like sample A, sample B or sample C? Sample B is great but it’s a little too soggy. Sample C is great but it’s just too salty. So you glomerate all those and kind come up with the best product. And then we have a couple different support people too. So Rachel Sears does our program coordination, so she does a lot of the events that we do. We’re planning a great event coming up in September. This event is really supporting food entrepreneurs throughout the state. Nick Trujillo is our ops manager. He does a lot of great things for us, kind of keeps things up and going. He actually interfaces a lot more with the public for programming that happen in the kitchen. Plus just making sure everything’s kind of well maintained and supplies are ordered and all that other good stuff. So great things happening. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great, thanks. That helps. And then in terms of understanding who your team is and then obviously on a day-to-day basis, you’re overseeing that team and what else lands on your plate? And maybe you can tell us of the tasks that you have to do on a daily basis. Is there one that you find you particularly dislike or one that you’re surprised you like doing? 

Mike Gabel: So a lot of that is getting those clients on board, onboarding new clients, getting them situated, talking about how we function, timeline for that. And then a lot of working and networking through the different entrepreneurs that we have or different organizations and nonprofits. For instance. Naturally Boulder is a great organization that we partner very closely with. We say we’re always this technical incubator so we can do all the food science stuff, but our expertise in launching a food product, there’s so much more. You need to have sales strategy, you need to have an understanding of the different channels you’re going into e-commerce, all these other good things. And we just don’t have that expertise. And so we always say we want to be the person or the resource to point them to the right thing. Do you need legal help? Do you need FDA help? We can point you to the right people. And so a lot of that is building up that network. I think the thing that I might like less living in Italy, there was a lot of bureaucracy with everything that you had. So just the bureaucratic thing, I think there’s just the pace of things of hiring somebody takes a little more time. There’s legal contracts or procuring things just takes a department upon a department and that’s understandable. You just have to become adjusted to that pace. 

Jocelyn Hittle: What about a task that you’re surprised that you really enjoy? 

Mike Gabel: As a staunch introvert, I’ve really kind of come to enjoy networking a lot more than I’ve used to in the past. Networking has never been one of those things that I would sign up for, but just talking to people and coming to a lot of the different events, it’s just been great to interact with so many wonderful people. Talk to them, get their story. I think everyone has a fantastic story and so I’m just grateful to hear and interact with a lot of different people. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well you’re also lucky in that what you do is really interesting and it ties to food, which everyone loves to talk about. Absolutely everybody. So you’d mentioned as you were describing the things that you do, a number of steps in a food product development process. It’s rather complicated. I think people don’t necessarily think when they’re pulling something off the shelf at the grocery store, how complex it’s been to get that where it is. When someone comes to you with a new product, let’s say optimistically, they have a absolute hum ding of a product and we know for sure it’s going to end up on a shelf from when they come in your door to when they might have something on the shelf of a grocery store. What’s the timeline? On average, 

Mike Gabel: We’re talking at least a year if not more like two years. And this is fairly in line with even the big companies up there, your Danone’s or your Kelloggs, that’s the typical life cycle that we talk about. And so when they come to us, we always kind of set that expectations up front is our even getting to that working prototype, that minimal viable product takes about six to eight months. And that’s just because we’re sourcing different ingredients, we’re looking at the process, we’re making sure that we going through a bunch of different iterations before we show you the first sample that we’re going to show you. And then we’ll come back and go get your feedback and do that a couple more times. And it just takes a long time. And then even after you have this formulation work, and that’s what we kind of call it, that product development in a way, a lot of people think as soon as I have that I can just go to this and they can make the product the next day. 

No, there’s a lot more of this sourcing and the ingredients. Even though we’ve done some sourcing, there’s the contractual obligation saying, all right, I’m going to buy this amount and then I’m going to go through the co-packer and get them set up. There’s a lot of contract work there to make sure that everything’s going to work out. And then even if you have a product still, I mean a lot of this happens temporaneously that you’re working through a sales strategy and you’re working through am I going to sell at a farmer’s market? I need to book space at the farmer’s market. I need to be talking to different distributors, working different trade shows. There’s a lot of great trade shows for food makers out there, expo West and I just was at in New York last week for the Fancy Food Show or two weeks ago. And that’s just a great place for people to show off their wares and talk to a lot of different grocery store buyers. And so there’s just a lot of interconnected parts to it and it just takes time. And I think we didn’t know that’s just the lifecycle of it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Sure. And starting any kind of new business is typically not an overnight success story. It might seem that way. What are some of the biggest challenges that you face in what you do and maybe some of the biggest misconceptions when you are networking with people and you’re describing what you’re doing, what are some of the surprising questions where you’re like, oh, clearly this person doesn’t quite understand what we do yet? 

Mike Gabel: I think a lot of it comes back to being tied with the university. They always kind of assume that, oh, this is great that your students can help out. No, all of our team is working professionals. They’ve all had a great background. I didn’t tell Martha has a great background in hard siders. Rachel Sears, who’s our program coordinator, even though she’s doing more admin work, is she has a background in pet treats, product development for pet treats. And I go, that’s great. Nick actually has a background in jams and jellies and a vegan treat and seafood. And so we have this wide variety of knowledge. But I think with that, our biggest challenge comes through. There’s still going to be somebody that shows up and has a product idea that we’ve never experienced. And so there’s a lot of just research, there’s talking to experts, there’s us wrapping our mind around it and then you can do it. 

So much research then you hit a wall, you just have to get in the kitchen and start developing. And so that’s just, we go through and you just don’t dunno what you don’t know. And so that’s been great for us. But yeah, I think the misconception is that number one timing, like we talked about before, there’s just we can’t do it fast. It’s going to take time. And then who we are really, we are here to exist people, we’re a team of scientists and there’s great knowledge that we have. There’s a lot of things you can study up on, but really someone that can kind of come and say, we’ve seen this product before, we’ve seen this. We understand how FDA works, we understand how this works. It helps to have that reassurance and that’s where I think we come in. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. And when you come up against a challenge like you just described or some other challenge in your work, is there someone that you call or some set of people, who do you rely on for help? 

Mike Gabel: I think it’s just great to have this network of experts that we have. We have people, like I said with FDA that we have an expert we call up and ask him. We have just, there’s a lot of gray areas there too. A lot of the different ingredient suppliers are actually great resources. They say, we want you to have this ingredient and we want to make sure that it succeeds. We want that product to succeed. You succeed when we succeed or vice versa. And so there’s just a lot of great people that have resources out there that’ll say, all right, try this, this or this. And we’ve had a lot of our industry partners. And so in if you walk through the ground floor of Terra and you look at the walls, ardent Mills has sponsored that kitchen area. They’re great resources just five minutes down the road. We enjoy meeting with them. We’ve had different projects where we’ve said, Hey, we need this type of flower. What guidelines do you have for us? Leprino Foods is another great one that we’re so excited to have on board. They’ve really helped develop our dairy innovation lab. So this has just been great to have some of those bigger partners with us too. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. And I’ll note that Dan Dye was a previous podcast guest this season as well with Arden Mills. So we heard a lot about all of the different innovations that are coming out of Arden Mills. Pretty exciting. So in that day, in a day of life for you, when you’re coming up against these challenges and calling on your networks and all of those things, I had to hope that all of us have a moment in a day like that where you feel like, oh, I was just good at this. And what has just happened when you feel that way? 

Mike Gabel: Oh, it feels amazing. I think there’re just people we get calling out of the blue that just say, we’ve been doing this product, I’m just afraid that it’s not safe or whatever else. And we go through and I said, you’re doing your due diligence, even making this call, make sure there’s a lot of people out going to doing the rogue things and just saying, all right, we’re pasteurizing this and we’re doing this and doing this. And I said, rest assured we have lots of background from years of research that you’re doing everything. You’re not going to kill anyone. The worst that can happen is maybe it’ll spoil over time, but it’s not going to be dangerous. And so just that assurance that sometimes you can give to these people that are saying, this is our livelihood. We’re doing this. We want to make sure that it’s safe, it’s wholesome. So that’s always the good feeling is just going getting off those calls and they’re not paid clients or anything else, but we’re still supporting that agriculture and food entrepreneurship in the state of Colorado and beyond. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I could see how that would feel good. And are there, on the flip side of that, any moments where you’re like still have a lot to learn? 

Mike Gabel: Oh, there’s so many things. And like I said, a lot of it comes down to the type of food that we’re developing. There’s so many different aspects. We wear so many different hats that working in as a product developer, you forget that in a large organization there’s so many that’s doing your quality work. There’s someone that’s doing your regulatory nutrition. And so now we wear so many different hats in here, so it’s hard to go back and go, all right, I know adjacent how this is supposed to work. And so I need to be a little bit more of an expert here. And there’s still a lot more things that we’re just trying to get a program up and running. And so that’s invoicing forms, that’s onboarding systems that sit in place so that we’re actually talking to each other. And it’s just been a great process. We have so many wonderful team members that are saying, this isn’t working or this is working. Let’s kind of perfect this. And so just as you’ve talked about many times, Jocelyn, as we’ve talked about, you are building that plane as you’re flying it, so it’s great. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, no shortage of lessons learned when you are doing something new for the first time that no one has done quite that way before. So it’s exciting. It takes the right kind of disposition and the right kinds of processes, and I know you and your team certainly exhibit all those. So my first spur of the moment question for you is sort of a bit of a cop out question on my part because it’s still about food. What is the weirdest product that has come through your whole career? We’re not just talking about here at the Food Innovation Center, but the strangest product you’ve ever encountered. You don’t have to name names. Oh, 

Mike Gabel: There’s been a few of them out there. My boss at Barilla, the pasta company, we were doing prepared meals and she wanted, and so this never got to market, I’ll tell you this much, but it was pasta paired with a sauce, Alfredo sauce or a red sauce or whatever else. And so she said, I really think pasta and chocolate would be a good combination. So I mean, she made some prototypes and they were nothing special. And so I’m trying to think of some of the other ones. There’s just been so many wonderful things out there. But yeah, a lot of strange that people are trying to get out on the market and may not fly as well as others. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Are we allowed to broadcast the comment about the pasta and chocolate from Barilla? 

Mike Gabel: Oh yeah. It’d be great. They’ll never see the light of day, but yeah, 

Jocelyn Hittle: Right. I don’t want to out anybody as having had too strange for the general public food 

Mike Gabel: Idea. No, but I think that’s where you want to be. I think there’s something to be said about pushing those limits and just kind of seeing what’s acceptable. And I think we as consumers, we fit into this very tight, we’re very comfortable with certain sets of foods and we don’t want to, there’s some adventurousness, but it’s still within your kind realm of comfort. And so I think there’s still something to be said about pushing your comfort level. And so I think that’s where you see different things from different cultures. You can kind of explore that and it really opens your eyes to different ways of being. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. I once had from the UK a shrimp flavored potato chip. 

Mike Gabel: Yes. 

Jocelyn Hittle: That on the face of it does not sound like, it’s not that we don’t have those in the us, but it’s one of the best things I’ve ever had. 

Mike Gabel: There was something that came out recently. We were talking about one ice cream company did a collaboration with I think Heinz Mustard, and they said they made a mustard flavored ice cream, and they said it was actually really good. And I go, I always kind of put the caveat that if you put enough cream and enough sugar in anything, it tastes good. 

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s right. Although I’m a mustard fan and an ice cream fan, so I suspect I might go for that. I’ll have to see if I can try it or make some myself. Okay. Let’s move on to talk a little bit about how you got where you are, as you know. Well, one of the things that we like to do here at the Spur campus is to introduce young people to careers they might not have considered before. So how did you get into this career when you were four years old? Did you say, I want to work in food, I want to be a food scientist, or did it evolve over 

Mike Gabel: Time? It was interesting. Through high school, I was always interested in nutrition. My mom was a nutritionist. She graduated from CSU and she never worked in it, but we always had healthy meals and she’d explained some just broad concepts. And I always was very active and athlete. And so actually my freshman year at CSUI considered a double major in exercise, sports science and also human attrition. And after a while, actually the pivotal moment was I think my sophomore year, I had to take gross anatomy, so I had to do the cadaver lab. And it wasn’t that I was grossed out about it. I think it’s actually fascinating. I think it was just the logistics that you had to bring a second set of clothes and change out of those. And I was like, I just don’t want to do that. And so I went and sat with my counselor and she said, Hey, if you do food science, you don’t have to do that. 

And I was like, what is food science? It was weird because the program is food science and human nutrition. I never considered what the food science aspect was. It was weird. And I said, what is food science? And she walked me through it. It was food manufacturing. And as a kid, as a little kid, I remember being fascinated by factory tours where you saw something being made, whether it be like robots or microchip or whatever else, like a food tour. It’s just super cool. And I dove right into it. I’ve asked if I changed my major, dropped my exercise sports science major, and it was just great. I had the connections there. It’s a very small program. It still lives very small as the food science goes at CSU, but a lot of great student groups that came through and they’d actually go, there’s actually, I sit on the board of the Rocky Mountain IFT Institute of Food Technologist, which is the Professional Society for Food Scientist. And so as a student, as a 19-year-old kid, we would go out to these factory tours we saw in Denver, they used to have the Jolly Rancher factory. And that was awesome because they say you pull a Jolly Rancher when it’s fresh off the line, it’s how hard, it’s kind of malleable and it’s just amazing. So we’ve got to see a lot of fun things that just grew that excitement about food science. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I also love a factory tour as a local, I’m sure you’ve taken the Celestial Seasonings tour at some point. Oh yeah. I don’t know that they’re doing them anymore, but I just remember being absolutely fascinated by that one. And yeah, I love a factory tour. I think the only one I’ve done that is food related, but they are so interesting and it’s nice to get a glimpse behind the scenes. Yeah, 

Mike Gabel: It’s fun. You can see Jelly Belly up in Northern California. We went there quite a bit and they have just this catwalk you can walk around and see and there’s just a lot of the other fun ones too. And you see just, I think unwrapped was so unpopular back in the early two thousands that just we love seeing how your food was made 

Jocelyn Hittle: And unwrapped for those who may not recall was a show on, was it on the Food Network. Food Network, 

Mike Gabel: Yep. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, absolutely. Fascinating. Just see a little bit how all these things are made. So you mentioned your second generation, Colorado State University, I believe if memory serves, you also have some family history in the food system. Is that right? 

Mike Gabel: A little bit. It’s interesting going back family history all away to my great grandparents who immigrated. So both my mom’s parents, Japanese Americans. And so they came over pre-war. Started out one family were farmers in California, had a big vegetable farm in California During the war, they got relocated to Colorado. And because of that, they actually ended up losing that farm. I think they kept farming for a while. They eventually opened up a caramel corn retail front, so they were making caramel corn in a bunch of different type of popcorn. And it was interesting. I drove by there, it was just coming back to Colorado. I drove by that storefront and saw they have a picture of my mom when she was about five years old. And this was kind of their exploration of food entrepreneurship and they didn’t keep it for long, but I think there was still something there. 

And so even my mom, like I said before, would cook these meals and just the traditions that we had through being a Japanese American, we would try some of the different foods. As a kid, I hated sushi. It was just one of those things that, but as I grew into a tea and nowadays I can’t live without it. So just some of those different food traditions and just seeing how those have impacted me. Even from my father’s side, he’s eighth generation from Germany, and so you’d see this Midwest, he grew up in Wisconsin, so just all these big, he came from a family of 12 kids. And so we would just have these huge family reunions where everything kind of focused around food and just those Midwest foods, just the smore export of just awesomeness. And so seeing those two different things I think influenced me a lot just to explore the creativity around food and just the joy that it brings to people. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Smog is borg of awesomeness is indeed how I would describe Midwestern food. Also as originally a mid westerner myself. Is it hot dish in Wisconsin or casserole 

Mike Gabel: More casserole, yes. There’s a lot of canned, so a lot of cheese always in the family, always a cheese. Oh yeah, it’s great. And then a lot of just the preserves, whatever else. And so my aunt makes this DLI beans, whatever else, the dill pickle with the green beans. And so that was always amazing too. Just so many different things to explore and to 

Jocelyn Hittle: Taste. Yeah, I love that. And I love that your family is sort of a microcosm of that mixture of different food cultures that you got to have at your own family kitchen table. That must’ve been great. So can you talk a little bit about how the field maybe has evolved or how your career trajectory has evolved? You’ve worked at a number of different food companies, maybe tell us a little bit about each of those and what you’ve seen in terms of your roles and how that’s evolved, how your role has evolved over time. Yeah, 

Mike Gabel: Absolutely. I probably had the best first job. It was working Windsor Foods, which is now part of ato, the big conglomerate in Japan. But beforehand they were doing frozen ethic food. And so I worked on their Mexican food division. And so it was an awesome first job. It really had you working in probably about a dozen different projects at a time. So you might be working on a roller taquito, something you put on the roller grill, like the hot dogs in the convenience store, or you’d be working on something for food service or you’d be working on a retail product. So you’ve got to touch a lot of different aspects of the food industry, all these different channels that we talk about. And in there, I remember walking in the factory the first time and I saw, I grew up in high school on these little one burritos. 

They were just like the 25 cent burritos. They were nothing special, anything else. I remember sitting a picture home saying, I make little one burritos. The company I work for makes little one burritos and I’m just so excited about it. It was just this fun exploration. It was just a great community, great coworkers. It was just fun to work on all these different projects. Going to ConAgra Foods was great too. It was a much bigger company. I think it was the third biggest at the time when I was there. And just seeing how different cross-functional teams work together. So you’re always working with a food safety person, a packaging person, a project manager, marketing sales and all these different people to see how you could get this was on a much bigger scale. So you were talking about 50, a hundred million launches of a product line. 

So it was just great to see how things worked together. So I worked on their healthy choice line for many years and then moved to Barilla. And Barilla was great. Barilla was worked on launching one of their shelf stable meals and eventually worked on a lot of different aspects on the positive side. But then when I transitioned to Italy, it was working on the global quality, making sure that you were looking at making sure that your product was the very best. And so a lot of it is tasting products with even leadership team, making sure that compared to competitors, ours was really holding up. And then after that, probably my favorite job that I’ve done so far was leading their research team. And so we always talk about research and development and obviously sometimes they’re together, but sometimes they’re separately. So development’s really like idea comes from marketing and you develop it and you launch it. 

Research is really saying there’s this new novel ingredient, this new novel process, there’s this really, can we explore insect protein, can we explore different, this really new technology that’s going to take this to the next level? So that was really fun where not a lot of things are going to stick. You’re going to have to kiss a lot of frogs to make sure that it’s going to work, but then you pass it off to somebody and you can kind of see the fruits of bringing in something new and very special to make people’s lives better and more nutritious or whatever asset it looks 

Jocelyn Hittle: Like. Well, I think you do a very good job of selling a career in food science. So for our younger listeners, think about it because not only is there opportunity for you to have a very diverse career path, research and marketing and manufacturing and all of the things that you mentioned touching on sound to me like it leads to a pretty diverse and interesting career, not to mention the opportunities for international work and connecting with a lot of different cultures and communities. So that all sounds amazing. What about each of these transitions, were any of them particularly hard or impactful? What did you learn from moving from place to place? 

Mike Gabel: Oh, it was I think about four months in when I was in Italy again, I had this task where I would go through and I would take one of our key products for Barilla and put it up next to the competitive product. And so this was meeting with, it was a family, it’s still a family owned company, so this was the brothers, the three brothers plus the CEO, and then the C-suite. We would sit around. And so it was fairly intimidating. I was doing it all in Italian. I’d had some experience in the past, but I wasn’t the best in Italian. I’d shown a product that just our performance wasn’t good. And so this was always blind. We always tested blind. And so when the big reveal comes, how was our product not doing better than the competitor X? And that caused a lot of ripples. 

And there was a lot of people emailing me saying, how did you show this product? I had one of my old bosses in the US that he was Italian and expat and then came back and he was a product manager of that. And he’s like, why would you do this to me? And so we were trying to transition my family. It was a new country, there was just a new language, there was so much going on and it was just a hard time. I was like, am I really going to make this? And everything else went kind of downhill from there, or not downhill, sorry, uphill from there, it turned out to be after some of those initial struggles, I think it made it work and just it developed into just a great experience for myself and for my family too. 

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. And it seems like there are sometimes failing early and maybe not failing early, that’s not really what you said, but sometimes having something be hard at the beginning of a transition is helpful in the long run because you learn quickly and sets you up for success. You said it was sort of all uphill from there and maybe in part because that happened so soon after you got there, I have one last question for you and then I’m going to hit you with two final spur of the moment questions. The final question I have for you is if you are going to give a 15-year-old advice, what would it be? And a 25-year-old. And then the addendum to that last one is yourself at 25, 

Mike Gabel: We have been working with a young entrepreneur. She is 12. Her name’s McKay, she’s amazing. And she already has her product. And so she just came last year to our Colorado showcase and she does a fruit leather. She also does this banana crunch, banana bark, I think she calls it. So it’s banana with almonds on it. It’s amazing. And so you can find her at the Larimer Farmers Market in Fort Collins and she’s great. And so I wasn’t on a different podcast with her. Oregon State does a podcast, they interview food entrepreneurs, and so they invited some different leads from the state. So myself as the food innovation center director to co-host that. And she got on there and one of the questions they had asked her is, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she said, I want to be a good person. 

And so I go, what if you can talk to anyone at 15 and say grow up to be a good person? You meet a lot of jerks and people that just rub you the wrong way. If you can just be a good person. I think that’s amazing. Learn ways to just serve other people and just help them out. I think that’s just a great philosophy in life. So 15-year-old, just focus on that 25-year-old. I think there’s so many things to focus on. I think I remember years ago I wrote down kind of just this bucket, not bucket list, but just a list of things that if you do these things, your life’s going to be better. And so it comes back down to some of these basic habits, get enough sleep, eat right exercise, and we hear all these things, but just have something in your life where you’re looking at it and you’re going like, all right, something’s out of whack. 

I’m not feeling right. Am I doing all these things? And so I think with that, especially when you’re young and getting into your career, make sure you’re balancing everything else. Jumping into a career, I remember I was not exercising a lot more. I’m so busy at work. And so trying to find that balance and balance is hard. It’s a myth. I think sometimes when we would talk about balance, there’s never an easy way of doing that, but take time to focus on yourself. I think that’s one of those things is be ambitious and everything else. But at the end of the day, it’s not all about your career. There’s great things, but I think your time outside of your job with your relationships that matter most are the things that are going to bring you the most joy. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. What about yourself at 25? 

Mike Gabel: 25? I think I’d say exactly what I just said. I think I was starting my first job. I think there was just a lot of different things. I had a young family at the time and just trying to find that joy in every moment. It’s just you keep thinking grass is greener on the next hill and just enjoy that moment. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s true. We do tend to think, well, I will do that when I retire or I’ll do that when I have the next job. But there are no good guarantees about how everything is going to unfold. So it is important to try to keep that balance. I have two final spur of the moment questions for you. The first one is around what you cook at home, if anything that you’re particularly proud of and you sometimes think, Hey, maybe this makes a good product and then I’ll hit you with the second one. 

Mike Gabel: So it’s interesting being a food scientist and living life in the kitchen, I’m not the best cook, which is weird. We talk about that. And there’s even been classes that a lot of scientists do to get more culinary skills. You don’t learn these skills, you learn more about the hydration rates of starches or the pH of different things, very scientific. And so you really don’t have this connection to food. So they do a lot of things. I got a degree or a certification in ology, so food science mixed with culinary science. And I’ve always been curious about food and I don’t admit to be the best chef, but there was just different things where I’d experiment. At one point in my life I was trying to make the best word. I was like, I love or chatta, it’s so good. So what does that take? 

And even adding some different scientific elements, if you put cinnamon on or chatta, it always kind of floats to the top. Can I get a cinnamon extract that’s not available on the market and put that in there and have that flavor a little bit more balanced, make that right. The one thing my kind of pursuit for the best is like Neapolitan pizza. And so in Italy, which is great, actually before I moved to Italy in our house, I’d been begging my wife to build a pizza oven. So I eventually built this pizza oven, a brick fired wood-fired pizza oven, built it from scratch and just loved it. And so I was experimenting with the right hydration ratio of the dough and the right cheese and the right topping and everything else. And so that was fun. And so I brought that to Italy too and it was just great to share that with some of our Italian friends and even put the pineapple in the pizza and whatever house and they thought it was blasphemous, but they think a lot of things are blasphemous and when it comes to food. And so it was fun. So that’s this been the lifelong pursuit of finding the right way of doing the right pizza. And it still is. I don’t think I ever experimented with anything too different. We do like a s’mores pizza where so you put the chocolate chips on, melted down, whatever else, and then you put the marshmallows on when it’s about halfway done so it gets nice and browned up. Then you kind of crumble some graham crackers on the top and it’s amazing. 

Jocelyn Hittle: My last spur of the moment. Question for you, you mentioned Jelly Bellies. I’m going to their factory. How do they do it? I’m a bit of a jelly belly connoisseur myself. I think they have a remarkable product in that it tastes so much like the thing it says it’s supposed to. And I’m curious just maybe a little bit as a food science example, tell us what you know about how they actually achieve that. 

Mike Gabel: So Jelly Bellies, actually, it’s interesting, they talk about this too. So a traditional jelly bean, if you looked at it, whatever else, just the nasty ones that you get for Easter that no one eats with the black licorice and the clove and whatever else, what they essentially do is they start with the same inside. And so it’s all just like this, the gummy whatever else, flavorless inside just a bunch of sugar and starch or whatever else. And then they put the flavor on the outside of what Jelly Belly does actually is they put the flavor inside and on the outside and that just impacts it. And so they really go through and they’ve really been meticulous about finding the right flavor. And so the world of flavor, it’s a whole different thing. There’s these flavor scientists that just know the right compounds to put in. 

And again, this seems like a lot more science, but a lot of the times they’re just distilling it down from natural strawberries or natural, the pina colada comes from natural pine, whatever else, and it’s just a very concentrated form. And so you’re still getting those natural flavors directly from the fruit or the seed or whatever else that it is. And so Jelly be just has, they’ve been very meticulous about it. Even the size I think impacts how it is, right? You always kind of visual that bigger kind of almond size jelly bean really is too much. And so you have that just the right size, the right flavor, it just, there’s just something fun about a small jelly bean that has that flavor impact. That’s how they do it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Mike, thank you so much. That was my last spur of the moment question for you. Thank you so much for joining me here on Spur of the Moment and look forward to continuing to work with you obviously here at the Spur Campus. For our listeners, is there anywhere they can find more information about the Food Innovation Center or they can, as I know and can sign up to be Taste Buds and come and do sensory testing. So where might they find more information? 

Mike Gabel: Yes, we are always looking for Taste testers. Taste Buds is our program where you can sign up. We always say if you like food and you like money and you have an opinion, come and sign up to be a taste bud. And we have lots of different tests that you can do over time, either a focus group or just a taste test. And so everything is on the CSU Spur website. But also you can find a link to our center or you can always contact I Michael Gable, Michael dot Gable, GABLE, at colostate.edu. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. Thanks Mike. And we’ll certainly add some links in the show notes as well for folks who like money, like food and have opinions to sign up to be a taste tester as part of our Taste Buds program. Thanks again so much for being with me today. Really appreciate your time. 

Mike Gabel: You are very welcome. Glad to be here. 

Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson and our theme music is by kea. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.