When developing a nutritional product with us, we are able to offer a 1-month to 6-month shelf life at ambient room temperature from a safety perspective from the time that your recipe is completed thanks to the internal tests we perform, such as our water activity level test (longer is often possible with further testing).
However, with all real food products, taste and texture will evolve over time. There is no way to know exactly how your product will evolve (ie; getting harder, softer, wetter, drier, etc) without testing it. The best way to test this is through formal shelf life testing. However, the time and cost involved in that is not always practical. As a result of this, we also offer incubator product testing in-house. With this, we take two units from either your efficiency test or your bench samples and place them in an incubator that we have in-house for 2 and 4 weeks at a fixed 100 F degrees.
After 2 weeks, our QA team takes out one of the two bars and performs full organoleptic analysis on the product and reports the results to you. At 4 weeks, our QA team performs the same analysis on your other product.
The extremely high temperatures are helpful in imitating a longer passage of time, and also very helpful in giving insight into how the product will perform if exposed to high heat during transit or storage.
Please note: formal shelf life testing is recommended for formal results. The results of this incubator test are informal and from our QA team and not a third party lab. Please also be aware that this is ONLY available to clients who are developing a product with YouBar or manufacturing a product with YouBar. It is not available to non-clients.