Production is the bridge between your concept and your market-ready product. It’s where your idea becomes something real — consistent, scalable, and ready for store shelves and distributor warehouses.
At Union Kitchen, we teach founders how to move in incremental steps from making small batches at home to large batch and semi-continuous. The goal isn’t just to make more product. It’s to make a product that’s consistent, profitable, and sustainable as you grow.
This roadmap brings together our best resources and lessons on scaling your recipe, choosing ingredients, and troubleshooting as you go — so you can launch smarter, faster, and with fewer costly mistakes.
Your recipe will never scale perfectly the first time. That’s normal — and expected. When you move from making one batch at home to making hundreds in a commercial kitchen, ingredients behave differently. Heat, humidity, surface area, and equipment all affect the final result.
That’s why scaling your recipe starts with writing everything down. Every temperature, weight, and time. This consistency is what allows you to test and troubleshoot effectively.
📘 Read: How to Scale a Recipe for Manufacturing
Learn how to adjust ratios, batch sizes, and ingredient weights to maintain the same flavor and texture at scale.
When you increase your batch size, ingredients don’t always react the way you expect. Think about how a teaspoon of salt dissolves in a cup of water versus a pound of salt in a 20-gallon vat. As you scale, surface area and heat transfer change — and so does your product.
Understanding this science is critical for building a stable, shelf-ready product.
📘 Read: Why Ingredients Behave Differently When You Scale Up
Discover how to adjust for differences in temperature, mixing, and timing as you increase batch size.
Not all ingredients behave the same way — and not all are designed for scale. You might love using fresh herbs at home, but they could cause spoilage or flavor inconsistency in a large batch.
The best production recipes use ingredients that are consistent, stable, and available year-round. That means thinking about substitutions early, like switching from milk to milk powder or using starch instead of breadcrumbs as a binder.
📘 Read: Best Practices for Selecting Ingredients That Scale
Learn how to evaluate stability, cost, and availability when building a product that grows with you.
Even with a perfect recipe, your first large batch probably won’t go as planned — and that’s okay.
Maybe your dough doesn’t mix evenly. Maybe your sauce thickens differently. Maybe your bars are too soft. Every food founder faces these challenges. The key is documenting what’s happening so you can isolate and solve the right problem.
📘 Read: Troubleshooting Common Scale-Up Issues
Explore common production problems and practical fixes that get you back on track fast.
Every successful food founder has gone through this learning curve.
Snacklins learned how to fry and season their chips at scale only after hundreds of small-batch tests.
Caribe Juice discovered that outsourcing manufacturing changed the flavor — and had to bring production back in-house.
They didn’t skip ahead to automation. They built expertise through iteration, so when it was time to scale, they knew exactly what needed to be mechanized.
That’s the goal of production — learning the process so deeply that you can scale without losing quality.
Production isn’t just about cooking more. It’s about building repeatable systems that support growth. That includes:
Writing detailed production plans (with exact time, temperature, and ingredient weights).
Logging each batch to understand what’s changing and why.
Setting ordering pars so you never run out of ingredients or packaging.
When you control your manufacturing, you control your future.
At Union Kitchen, we help food founders learn how to scale their recipes, refine their processes, and manufacture products consistently. Through the Union Kitchen Accelerator, members gain access to resources, coaching, and production systems that turn small-batch recipes into scalable businesses.