Meaning the R&D team headed by Michet has been very busy the past few years – and not just with new flavors or new shapes of macaroni, but incorporating new packaging, cooking formats and fortification ingredients. All of which helped make Goodles our R&D Team of the Year in the medium-sized ($100-750 million sales) category.

“We have four people on our team,” explains Michet. “There's myself, who leads the whole team, and I'm also a food scientist and product developer. Kristin Slarve, who's also a food scientist and our director of R&D, is responsible for formulation, ingredient procurement, labeling. Chris Woods is director of brand and innovation, but he’s really like our cross-functional business liaison, making sure all the projects get through on time. And Martha Chapman, senior manager of packaging R&D, and she's a new addition. She came on early this year, and just in the nick of time, as we're going into many new categories.

“This is the first time we've had a packaging engineer; we've sort of been cobbling it together ourselves and with our manufacturing partners, but it just got to be too cumbersome and kind of over our heads. So we knew we needed to hire somebody.”

A small handful of contract manufacturers make all Goodles products. “Different product lines require different manufacturing partners,” says Michet. “We do all of the upfront lab benchwork and prototyping work ourselves. We do employ them [co-mans] when it comes to commercialization, working with their teams to make sure that scale up is successful.

The typical process

“Chris Woods pulls together information to provide a brief to us with multiple inputs, including my own, but also from sales and Jen [Jeszut], our CEO, and others in operations. Chris puts together a project brief that we use like a guideline on what we need to do to produce a prototype.

“From there, we source our materials, we create formulas, all adhering to the nutritional targets and other targets that are listed on the brief. We have daily touch points with one another, but we've got weekly cross-functional meetings with the broader team, and then we also have stage gate meetings on a regular basis that sort of bring in the management team and our organization for approvals.

“This process could be anywhere from six months to 12 months. We're in a speed-to-market kind of environment here, so if we're lucky, we have 12 months of time. And then we work with our contract manufacturers to help scale up and ensure success. We have groups of commercialization people that go out and support trials and support first production runs to make sure everything goes as planned.”

That original dry, boxed mac & cheese line now comprises 14 varieties, including asiago, grilled American cheese, hatch chile, smoked gouda, black truffle and pesto. Three variations are gluten-free and one is vegan.

There are three varieties with “squeezy cheeses,” liquid cheeses in pouches, in mild cheddar, aged white cheddar and Tex-Mex. And nine varieties of Protein Pasta, dried noodles in various shapes, all with 19g of protein, 12g of fiber and “21 nutrients from plants.” Three of them are gluten-free.

Single-serve cups were just launched last year and proved to be a challenge because they were the first Goodles products not meant to be cooked on a stove top. “Now you see why we needed a packaging engineer?” Michet asks. “This is a totally different way of cooking and preparing our food.

“We were hoping it would be as easy as just putting our regular food into the cup and letting it rip. But, no, we had to re-engineer almost the whole thing. Starting with the noodle, we had to alter the thickness to make sure it cooked quickly and evenly in the microwave. The cheese needed to be redesigned, because we're no longer asking the consumer to add milk or butter. We needed to revise it to be flavored properly. So adding a little bit more buttery and milky notes, and also redesigning it to work so you can stir it in easily.

“We also had to make sure that the noodles didn't boil over in the microwave, so we had to develop a special anti-spillover, anti-boil starch blend, an ingredient used in the cup to prevent spill over. And then we had to design the new cup, which we hadn't had in the past. We wanted to use a paper-based cup versus an all-plastic cup, with a higher edge to help prevent spill over.” And a reattachable lid to prevent messes on-the-go.

“It was a stretch. It was a learning curve. I think the hardest thing to overcome was getting the flavor right, because taste is the No. 1 thing for our brand. That surpasses anything nutritional or cost-wise. And so getting the taste perfect took a lot of time. That was our biggest hurdle.”

While the team at Goodles is always looking for ways to innovate, it’s apparent they will stay close to noodles in at least the short term.

“We are always playing in the kitchen,” Michet continues. “Ideas at our company come from everywhere. They can come from the lab and things that we happily, and maybe surprisingly, come across ourselves. They come from our retailers. They come from our consumers. We have a lot of inputs into what we do. We’re always looking to see what is our next big opportunity, but we see a lot of space to grow still within the macaroni segment.

“I think the reason for our company’s success is our team. [Not just] the R&D and innovation team, but also all of our cross-functional team members. We are such a tight group here at Goodles, and we meet regularly [but most are remote].

“I live nearby, so I do a lot of my work at [company headquarters] in Santa Cruz, Calif. But we're all spread out all over the country. But we talk all the time. We have regular meetings in-person off site, and we get together for team building and get some really good work done while we're together. None of this could ever happen without all of us working together.

“In Santa Cruz, we have a gorgeous, huge kitchen at HQ. I think it's probably a third of the size of the building. The way it's laid out, it's open, there’s a tasting table, so I'm able to use folks at HQ to provide input into flavor and help with ideas. It’s a really fun environment. It's very engaging and collaborative, and it's just a great group.

“Our mission was to take the noodle, which everybody loves, and make it better for you and still be as delicious as everybody remembers it to be. To get protein in there, to get fiber in there, to get vitamins and minerals from plant-based sources in there. To make it a better, healthier experience.

“We also want to bring joy to everybody. We have a lot of joy when we're making the food, developing the food, but we also want our consumers to experience as much joy as they can when they're eating the food.”

Mission accomplished.