AFIC, The Sparks Goal.
- Zach Sparks
- Jan 29, 2016
- 2 min read
Another exciting week is in the books! This week I had a chance to speak with some of the faculty at the Arkansas Food Innovation Center (AFIC). The AFIC is a division of the University of Arkansas’ (UARK) Institute of Food Science and Engineering. The center is geared towards assisting entrepreneurs with processing of value-added food products. In the case of Sparks: American Pepper Sauce, that would be our actual pepper sauce!
At the AFIC I was introduced to a few key people that help ensure the center runs properly and all the needs of the entrepreneur is taken care of. The center offers a bunch of great tools that will be rather helpful taking the sauce to a larger production level. There they can check accurately what the sauces PH levels are, produce Nutritional Fact Panels and print labels. Those are just a few of their services that will increase productivity. One of the key services, they have a fully certified and inspected kitchen. Once we make the move to their facilities, this will be a huge step to completing FDA approval.
Overall it was a great trip and tour. I really look forward to working with the staff in the future. I see great growth potential and felt that they really wanted to help! Before we get to that point though, we’ve got some work to do.
I really feel like we’re on the right track to perfecting Project Green Machine. One of their requirements is a full process worksheet for each product. Essentially the recipe’s playbook. Since the Project Green Machine sauce has seen the biggest support, we want to lead with that. From now until it is hammered out to perfection, we will be focusing primarily on that sauce. For those of you wanting to try the Project Blackberry, there is a batch almost finished that we plan on sharing still! As for the Project Blueberry, we’re still going to try it out. We just need to set the priority to the main sauce.
Another large obstacle is going to be raising the money to expand what we can make as well as the fees it takes to use the AFIC services. While the services aren’t unreasonable, they will be a hurdle to get up and going. For that, in the next few months we would like to get a kickstarter going. It will focus on getting some much needed equipment as well as covering the fees that come with the AFIC. That’s still a ways off but we want to let everyone know. We appreciate the support and want to share the sauce with as many people as we can.
On the note of sharing, the Project Blackberry will be the first bottle we send out in the mail for sampling. There is only a limited amount of bottles so if you’re interested, please keep your eye out for that announcement.
-Zach
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