When developing a formula with us, we are able to offer you an immediate shelf life of between 1 and 12 months from a safety perspective as a result of the internal tests we perform, such as our water activity level test, and our in-depth, QA document-controlled ingredient knowledge. This means that we can guarantee that your product will be safe for consumers to eat for a period of 1-12 months. Please ask our food science team for the exact measure that we are able to offer you.
That being said, it is not possible to know how time will impact the organoleptic features of your custom-developed product (ie; taste, texture, etc) without doing formal lab-based shelf life testing.
YouBar always recommends doing a formal shelf-life study on all products. However, because we know the importance of speed to market for our clients, we allow them to opt out of formal shelf-life studies if they would like. That being said, it is important to know that we cannot know in advance how your product will perform organoleptically over time. This includes (but is not limited to) things like product hardening, oil separation/leakage, softening, a ‘drying out’ effect, a preservative effect, an evolving taste profile, color changes, etc.
If you would like to engage in formal shelf life testing of your product, we will need to ship sample product out to a third party Food Testing Laboratory for microbiological shelf life testing. The product for this cannot come from a bench sample; it must come from a true production run. These tests often enable our clients to achieve shelf lives up to 12-18 months. Please ask the YouBar R&D team for the costs associated with formal shelf life testing.
Shelf life testing stores the product at 25 ± 2 degrees C and performs the following tests:
Day 0
Water Activity
Salmonella
E. coli
Staphylococcus Aureus
Listeria
Aerobic Plate Count
Yeast / Mold
Organoleptic Analysis
Days 14, 90, 120, 180, 240, 300, 365.
Aerobic Plate Count
Yeast / Mold
Organoleptic Analysis
At the end of this process, you will receive a final short report on the findings.
If you plan to engage formal shelf life testing, please let the YouBar team at least 2 weeks before your production run in order to give QA the required advanced information to know to pull product from the run to send to the lab.