Our real secret ingredient
is the team behind the tool.

Our real secret ingredient is the team behind the tool.

When you’re on the frontlines of food innovation you need guidance from
knowledgeable people who understand your needs. Here we are!

When you’re on the frontlines of food innovation you need guidance from knowledgeable people who understand your needs. Here we are!

Contact us

A message from the Founder, Robert Danhi:

As culinary professionals, we didn’t set out to develop game-changing proprietary R&D software, but once we saw and felt the need for it, we just had to! Like many R&D professionals, I was frustrated that the data management of my culinary projects — collecting and coordinating files, photos, and notes — took precious time away from what I loved and excelled at: innovating consumer-focused culinary R&D products and processes. I knew there had to be a better way and my understanding of what this system would look like began to grow.

In 2015, Karena Wong (Flavor360™ co-founder and Director of Research) and I gave a presentation at the RCA annual conference entitled “Field Research and Food Tours — How to Capture, Translate and Incorporate into Your R&D Process.” We shared our methodology for collecting and digitizing data in the field in order to extract meaningful insights through analysis of both content and context. It was a good system but it was still more work and less automation than desired. Our colleagues listened and asked the same question: Isn’t there an app for that? Well, since you asked…

Our research, projects, and conference presentations continued to reveal layers of WHAT we needed and WHY the industry needed it. Karena and I now had a clear vision and gathered a diverse, talented team of culinary consultants, aligned them with the powerful software designers at iCertainty, and taste-tested our developing software platform on real R&D projects until it was the streamlined interactive database to capture, codify, collaborate, and analyze data in that we imagined six years prior.

Because our industry-leading F&B collaborators provided developmental feedback on database and UX features, the Flavor360™ suite of apps is truly chef-driven, consultant-supported, and ready for YOU so you can get back to enjoying R&D again!

First, we listen to you. Our goal is that you’ll find working with Flavor360™ to be an efficient, customized experience, so we ask about your objectives, processes, pain points, and vision for your project and processes. We dive into what is working and what you want to improve. We conduct an in-depth, focused assessment of what teams, tech, and tools you already have in place related to your project. Guided by this information, we develop a unique, customized strategy to help you meet your goals in new and innovative ways by leveraging our consultants and proprietary software solutions to get you what you want.

Next, our team customizes the Flavor360™ app UX templates and real-time dashboards needed to collect multimedia data for your project as specified. Whether you are conducting cuttings and tastings; recipe and prototype evaluations; competitive analyses; lexicon research and analysis; or ideation sessions, we align the software interface, our internal team training, and all aspects of our support to match your goals. Our team continues to work alongside yours to leverage the software’s unique features to capture as much multimedia data as you need — and you never have to wonder where it went — it’s all stored and organized in your custom database, ready to query.

Once the data is collected, we guide you on how to leverage the project database to discover insights to make data-driven decisions. Seeing the data aggregated and manipulated in the dashboard inspires deeper, critical thinking as we train your team to annotate, tag, share, and expand on what you have gathered. The richness and value of the data increases as your team members engage with the data and each other, sharing insights and building connections that answer the questions you need to and raising others that may have been hidden otherwise.

We assist a wide variety of clients — from top industry leaders to up and coming brands — and facilitate projects across the F&B spectrum, but the results of employing your custom Flavor360™ solution will be very similar: increased R&D process efficiency; better team accountability and traceability; saved time and frustration due to data management; streamlined real-time communication with team members and clients; and more enjoyment of your R&D process because now you have not only a tool to tame your data, but also a team to guide you.

Our team of industry experts understands your goals

Robert Danhi

Chief Innovation Officer

As a thirty-six year veteran and thought leader in the F&B industry, Robert has funneled his deep knowledge, passion, and expertise into co-founding the Flavor360™ software platform, a suite of mobile apps and interactive R&D database.

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Karena Wong

Director of Research

Before co-founding Flavor360™, Karena served as the lead researcher of numerous R&D projects with Chef Danhi for clients like Campbell’s, Applebee’s, and innovation work for Google Food.

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Chase Obenchain

Director of Client Services

Chase Obenchain is one of the R&D leaders at Flavor360™ where he is spearheading development of a full knowledge template library focused around codifying foods and flavors.

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Elijah Wong

Platform Applications Specialist

Elijah’s experience as a student of Food Science and Technology with an emphasis in Culinology at Cal Poly Pomona currently inspires him to bring a fresh perspective to Flavor360™ as he assists in the development of template processes for various use cases throughout culinary R&D.

Nimisha Chouhan

Platform Applications Specialist

Nimisha’s internships while earning her BS in Culinary Science at the CIA offered her practical experience in consulting and R&D product development which she now shares as platform specialist for Flavor360™ working with back-end developers to streamline data gathering and analysis.

Lisa Danhi

Executive Editor

Primarily a writer, editor, and language arts instructor, Lisa also has a taste of culinary experience to bring an objective, critical eye to the internal and external documentation at Flavor360™. Her goal is to bridge the potential gap between insider F&B terminology and the consumer-reader to cultivate shared language and understanding.

Angella Thompson

Project Manager

Angella guides the team using her 10 years of Project Manager experience ranging from academia to tech startups. She has written extensively for the natural history museum environment, publishing a series of best practices and workflows which she has presented on internationally.

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POWERED BY

Flavor360™ is backed by iCertainty, an experienced team of innovators in the food industry. With 15+
years in the business of creating culinary applications for health and safety, iCertainty brings their
extensive knowledge of back-end development to Flavor360™’s one-of-a-kind software.

Publications & Presentations

The Building Blocks of Flavor: Ingredients, Components & Builds

Every one of us in the F&B business either buys or sells an ingredient, component, or build related to a product. Chef Danhi deconstructs how to internally systemize the flavor evaluation process and speed up innovation and R&D workflow. (Premiered at ICCA 2021 Annual Summit)

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Cultivating Subjectivity in Product Tastings

Every organization struggles during product and menu item daily and weekly evaluations — such as internal cuttings and tastings — especially when most companies throw out the knowledge, expertise and rigor applied to “Sensory Evaluation” and over-simplify to an informal tasting, discussion and a few notes. This study includes interviews with industry leaders, documents current best practices, and proposes new ways in conceptualizing and implementing a systematic process that takes scientific process of sensory evaluation out of the lab and into the kitchens of R&D professionals wherever tastings are facilitated.

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Digitization of Culinary Knowledge in Recipes Using Ontologies and Applications in the Digital Kitchen

Digitization of recipes via ontology considers humanities, ingredients, methods/techniques, bio-active/nutrition components, and properties. This paper proposes parsing recipe data for the above information using existing or creating new ontologies for food, chemical composition, genetics, and nutrition, and humanities ontologies for contextual data like geography, location, history, population, culinary etiquette, and physical and emotional interaction with fellow diners.

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Developing Your Flavor Lexicon and Ontology to Speed up the R&D Process

The lack of a “common language” in R&D processes could result in faulty guidance and misrepresentative prototypes and products. Because internal cutting and tastings are characterized by on-going communication among internal and external cross-functional teams, developing standardized culinary and sensory lexicons to translate qualitative descriptions into quantifiable product features is critical to improve communication proficiency and product consistency. (Premiered online at the RCA Annual Conference in 2021)

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Trusted by leading F&B companies

“Flavor360™ EXPLORE app allowed our team to do field work across the globe when COVID prevented us from being there in person. Their team of experts helped shape our research, execute it flawlessly, and synthesize meaningful insights through the multimedia dashboard as we captured emotions and stories as if we were actually there experiencing it firsthand.”

Carol McCall | Pepsico
Director, Product Development

Digitize and transform your R&D process

Digitize and transform
your R&D process

Learn more today