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Food For Thought

Helping you develop delicious products that sell

SarahKingAug202019

Together we can

  • Transform your recipe ideas into delicious products that sell
  • Scale your food or beverage business
  • Launch commercially viable products
  • Connect you with relevant industry experts
  • Get your product into consumers’ hands
I am…

  • An award winning product developer
  • A passionate foodie who loves making tasty products
  • A commercially astute mentor, helping my clients to succeed
  • An honest, helpful and flexible problem-solver
  • A firm believer that flavour matters most
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Working with me

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By collaborating with me you’re making a long-term investment in your ideas, your passion, and your brand. Not only do I perfect your recipes in the kitchen and upscale them commercially, I also coach and empower my clients, giving them the skills and knowledge they need to futureproof processes and continue growing independently.

I love solving problems, and helping clients to build strong, sustainable brands and products that genuinely meet consumer needs. I’m commercially astute and particularly skilled at helping clients flex their ideas and recipes to new food and beverage trends, and dietary requirements.

I work across all food and drink categories with specialist expertise in: healthier snacking, drinks (low alcohol, juice drinks, smoothies, squash, protein shakes, dairy-free), baby and toddler foods, soup, plant based yogurt, honey, superfoods, protein powders.

When you work with me, you get 20+ years of experience in new product development, a robust network of professional industry contacts, transparency and constructive feedback, commercial expertise and strong marketing experience, expertise in qualitative and quantitative consumer testing.

Interested in working together?

Lets chat!
Contact me

How I can help

Whether you’re starting out, or ready to expand an existing range, I’ll help take your food and drink ideas from conception to fruition. Together, we can perfect your recipes and commercially source ingredients to produce them at scale.
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Product strategy and planning

Category and gap analysis
Ideation workshops
Food trends
Pipeline development
Competitor review
Benchmarking
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New Product Development

New recipe development to brief
Existing recipe and cost optimisation
Competitor taste benchmarking
Ingredients sourcing
Nutrition
Shelf life
Consumer research and testing
Project management
delivery

Delivery

Factory/co-packer sourcing
Factory trials and scale up
Trial planning and management
Factory launch
training

Training & Support

Mentoring and coaching in new product development
Recruitment for NPD team members
Team structure and review
Sensory training and taste development
tools

Tools

Project plan
Shelf life tracker
Competitor review
Theoretical nutrition calculator
Simple cost model
Marketing brief
Supplier and retailer sell in deck

My Story

“Two things make me really happy – seeing a new product being enjoyed by consumers, and seeing the people I work with develop and succeed. Food is an emotive subject so being involved in consumers’ happiness makes me happy.”

Sarah grew up with a love of tasty, healthy and balanced home-cooked food and wanted to work in the food industry from a young age. She achieved a degree in Hotel and Catering management, but her food career was really established working as a Food Selector at Marks & Spencer’s head office. She worked across a range of categories and relished travelling the globe looking for new and exciting concepts to launch.

Having worked in a large food business, Sarah was excited to get the opportunity to work on the smaller Innocent Drinks sub-brand This Water (now called Juicy Water), before transitioning into Innocent Drinks to head up the product development team.

Her passion for developing strong brands with a purpose and mentoring people continued, when she left London to head up the product development and project management team at Ella’s Kitchen baby food.

With over 20 years of product development experience, Sarah decided in 2015 to become a freelance consultant. This enables her to help food and drink entrepreneurs see their ideas come to life and she loves helping them gain the skills, knowledge and contacts they need to succeed long term.

Sarah lives in Berkshire and is a mum to one son.

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Career

  • Food for thought NPD consultant (6 years)
  • Ella’s Kitchen baby food – Head of new product development (3 years)
  • Innocent Drinks – Head of new product development (2 Years)
  • This Water – Head of innovation (3 years)
  • Nestle UK beverage division – Head of innovation (2 years)
  • Marks & Spencer plc – Food selector (8 years)

My Work

I have been lucky to work with some great clients and projects

Interested in working together?

Lets chat!
Contact me

Testimonials

Thank you for all your help over the last 12 months. Can’t believe how far the honey has come in such a short space of time! Your experience and expertise has been invaluable.

Joe Harper

Co-founder, Just Bee

Sarah’s knowledge and experience in identifying product & category opportunities and developing innovative food products has been a great help to Aduna. It’s good to have her as part of the team.

Nick Salter

Co-founder, Aduna

In the early stages of Huel, before we had our own team, Sarah helped us by working on Huel Powder’s challenging base to improve the flavour and texture. Sarah is highly experienced, helpful and great to work with.

James Collier

Co-founder, Huel.

Sarah displayed bucket-loads of passion, energy and drive and has incredible tenacity in bringing challenging projects through the completion.  Sarah was integral to the success of Ella’s and was also brilliant at living and breathing the Ella’s Kitchen values.

Mark Cuddingham

Managing director, Ella’s Kitchen

I have no hesitation in recommending Sarah. She’s diligent, detailed and is a pleasure to work with.

Dan Barrett

Managing director, Deliciously Ella

I loved working with Sarah. She’s super high energy, cutting edge on food trends and constantly asking questions to make sure you get to the best possible product as fast as possible.

James McMaster

Co-managing director, Ella’s Kitchen/ CEO Life Health Foods EU

Sarah Was a fantastic asset in the early stages of developing quite a complex nutritional food product destined for distribution in hospitals and other healthcare providers. She identified potential manufacturing partners and was instrumental in liaising and connecting us to specialised ingredient suppliers. Sarah was a fantastic project manager, setting out clear timelines and goals for development as well as helping to overcome many an operational hurdle along the way.

Alan Rosenthal

Freelance culinary creative

Sarah has done an amazing job developing 3 new TRIBE ranges over the past few years. Sarah brings huge energy, commitment and creativity to all innovation work and combines this with experience and a practical approach that has helped us to bring products to market quickly and seamlessly. Plus these products have launched with very positive feedback from Day 1! We have loved working with her and couldn’t recommend her more highly.

Tom Stancliffe

Co-founder, Tribe

Say Hello

Want to know more? I’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in working together, please get in touch.
Message me
Foodforthoughtnpd@gmail.com
Give me a call
07831362529

I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. My usual working hours are 8.30am to 5.30pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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