From Food Enthusiast to Food Scientist

I often have these moments where I ask myself: how did I end up here?

A female-founder, entrepreneur, dual American-British citizen in London.

I had one of these moments recently, standing on a manufacturing site production floor where it seemed like Murphy’s Law was in full effect — everything, and I mean everything, was going wrong.

I’ll return to that. But first, let’s back up to how I got here in the first place.

I grew up in Upstate New York, in a small town, with Italian-American heritage running through everything. My father was a food scientist, deeply passionate about working out and eating healthy. My mother worked for the government and leaned hard into cooking Italian classics at home, as a first-generation Italian-American. For as far back as I can remember, I’ve been completely obsessed with food — eating it, cooking it, even just going to the grocery store. Looking back, it was pretty inevitable I’d end up in this industry.

My upbringing was a little abnormal, by most standards. While my friends were outside all summer, I was in the lab with my father, smelling different natural flavors and guessing which fruit they were. Instead of coloring books, I designed packaging labels. I made my own orange creamsicle electrolyte beverage as his helper. We never had ultra-processed food at home unless I was at a friend’s house — everything was made from scratch. I started working in the lab with my dad at 14, during summers, and then worked at an assisted care home at 17, serving meals to the elderly. Even that young, I understood how much food shapes people’s everyday experience and health — and I knew I wanted to make an impact in the industry myself.

Fast forward to 19: I was living in New York City, starting a job at Vita Coco in marketing, educating consumers on the benefits of coconut water. The business was growing fast, and it was an exciting, slightly chaotic time to be there. Soon I had the opportunity to move into a Quality Assurance internship in the office, while attending food science college full time — busy years, but NYC has a way of making you feel like you should be operating at 150% all the time anyway.

From there, I grew into other QA roles, then R&D, then Innovation — which eventually moved me to the London office. I was excited to learn how other markets worked, and from 22 onward I was traveling internationally constantly. It genuinely felt like a dream. I loved the process of innovating a product and then hearing the impact it had on people — the best version of that being someone telling you, unprompted, “it tastes amazing.”

That love of the process is what eventually led me to start my own food science consultancy, supporting everyone from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies through the journey from concept to commercialization. We’ve been operating for six and a half years now, and have helped launch new products for over a hundred companies globally. We work across better-for-you, better-for-the-planet consumer products — functional beverages, healthy snacks, pet food, even beauty. The category lines are getting more blurred every year; my rule of thumb these days is: if a human can eat it, we can probably help build it.

I’ve spent my whole career in the part of the food industry most people never see or think about. I want to start writing about it — the formulation trade-offs, the trends everyone’s chasing and what’s actually happening underneath them, what it’s really like building a technical consultancy as an American founder in London, and the lessons (often expensive ones) that clients and experience have taught me along the way.

If you’re a founder trying to get a product to shelf, a curious eater who wants to understand what’s actually in your food, or just someone who likes a good behind-the-scenes story about an industry hiding in plain sight — I think you’ll find something here.

(And yes, I’ll come back to that production floor story. Murphy’s Law and I have a long history.)

What I ate this week that was delicious

I tried the new Ottolenghi ice cream from Waitrose — specifically the Madagascan Vanilla & Miso Caramel. Absolutely delicious. As a self-appointed ice cream expert (mostly eating, not formulating), I love a good twist on vanilla. The miso brings umami notes against the caramel’s sweetness, and it works beautifully. I added a banana on top — highly recommend for the next heatwave.

I’ll be posting here every Friday. See you next week.

Natalie

Originally published on Substack.