My entrée into product development started before I was even a prep cook. I was working in a family restaurant after “graduating” from fast foods and there were actual herbs and spices in the stock room, instead of just prepared franchise goods. On a slow shift, I was organizing and labelling the stock room when I realized that if the herbs in that room hadn't been labeled, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. So…I started smelling them before I even began making actual sauces, soups and other recipes. When I got a chance to actually prepare recipes, I bought retail spices for our kitchen in the house I shared with my college friends and made carefully measured “tea” from all the herbs so that I could taste them individually and together.
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I trace my obsession for balanced flavours that end cleanly together to that early project. That mania has been good for my career.
In those days, most herbs were packed in 5-pound cardboard boxes with plastic liners…enough to last for years! When I was finally in charge of my own professional kitchen, I started repacking the herbs in 1-quart plastic bottles and freezing them, except for the bottles in use. Years later, 1-quart plastic bottles that had ultraviolet protection against light denaturing the flavours became commonplace, and we are all used to them now.
Of course, we can still screw things up by buying the bigger gallon sized bottles, so the herbs can last long enough to go stale…. I try to talk my clients out of that! Yes, they’re less expensive in the large pack size, but we’re still talking less than a penny a serving for the ingredients that serve to differentiate your products more than almost anything else in the recipe.
A few years later when I was specifying ingredients as the executive chef for a very large company, I tested herbs and spices of all the major spice packagers. I made tea with the herbs, and tested the spices on either ground beef or chicken breasts, all measured extremely carefully with a scale that went to two decimal places in grams.
Interestingly, a few years later the very scientific and visionary Cook’s Illustrated magazine (which is now also America’s Test Kitchen on television) performed the same tests with the exact same procedures, and chose the exact same spice company as the best available in North America (and very likely the world.)
This isn’t big news folks…they are EVERYWHERE, as they deserve to be! McCormick brands include Club House, Lawry’s, Old Bay and many other non-spice brands.
There is one very big secret about McCormick, though...they own a company that kicks their ass. McCormick owns SupHerb Farms.
I hasten to add that McCormick still deservedly dominates the spice market. But SupHerb? They deserve to dominate the food service herb market. No one comes close to competing, but very few companies seem to know about them.
SupHerb specializes in cultivating, harvesting, chopping and freezing fresh herbs. They also do culinary purees and pastes and some frozen vegetable flavourings, but personally I consider these herbs to be the heart of their business. They’re the biggest kept secret in food service, and they are criminally overlooked in my opinion.
Harvested at the peak of ripeness, SupHerb Farms herbs are fresh frozen within hours, offering locked-in flavour and color. Their fresh frozen Herbs are ready to use – washed, chopped and fully prepped. Rigorous safety and quality controls, including strict oversight in the field, during processing, packaging, warehousing and shipment ensure food safety.
In every blind tasting panel I have done, making “tea” and then using their products in recipes versus dried herbs, SupHerb has won the taste tests. I used exactly the same fluid measures of herbs in these tests. Spices and herbs are the only thing I measure by volume as they are frequently too light to weigh.
Fresh herbs with no labor wins! Alert the media!
None of this:
Or this:
SupHerb Farms have a patented process that leaves them with no competitors.
And these fresh frozen chopped herbs are half the price of dried.
Let’s use Sysco or GFS whole dried Thyme leaves as an example. Of course, these are both McCormick herbs…they are just another co-pack for McCormick!
A good price for a case of 12 X 175 g bottles of McCormick/Club House/Sysco/GFS dried Thyme leaves is $98.23. The yield is 408 fluid ounces.
A good price for a 5 pound box of SupHerb chopped fresh frozen Thyme leaves is $56.80. The yield is 453 fluid ounce.
McCormick’s Dried Thyme Leaves: $.24 per fluid ounce.
SupHerb Fresh Chopped Frozen Thyme Leaves: $.13 per fluid ounce.
Enough said?
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