Month: March 2020

This is the machine that puts the sour cream & snonion flavor on the chips. Each of our flavors has its own production schedule and its own flavor management. We don’t add the flavoring to the regular chips, we add them to the base chips. The flavorings are all unique, but the base chips are exactly the same for every flavor in the production line. The only exception we’ve ever had for that was with our Pineapple & Shrimp flavor. The best flavoring variant that we had for that one had an odd ability to absorb humidity from the air, which wasn’t a problem for our application process, but as the water evaporated again from our pre-packaging bake, the flavoring tended to clump to outside the tolerance of our product line. We found that we were able to cook the chips about 8% longer at a slightly lower cook temperature, which solved that problem. But that flavor was always a headache, mainly because we couldn’t use base chips to make them. Integrating that chip in the assembly process was always extra work, but management wanted to keep that flavor on the shelves until after Neighbor Day because it had become something of a flagship for the brand. So we just kind of muddled through. But then when the shortages finally came after the paper-cut scare, we had no choice but to eliminate it. We’ve had more complaint mail about that decision than any other in the history of Chipgasm. And it wasn’t an easy decision because our pilot operation manual requires that we place the customers’ needs ahead of our direct internal profitability within the magin of operational safety. But we had no choice once the rations began, there was no way for us to meet our quota for the core-four chips of regular, barbecue, sour cream & snonions and the fourth, which our floating flavor. That’s the one we typically use for nutritional delivery. We don’t currently have a way to incorporate the nutritional delivery into the regular, barbecue of sour cream & snonions because it changes the taste, and our pilot operation manual won’t let us change more than 75% of the product line if the complain letters exceed 12% over standard response. The floating flavor is essentially designed to accept the nutritional or pharmaceutical delivery, so we have a lot of latitude with what we use. In my opinion as a taster, the floating flavors will never equal the taste experience of the other core-four flavors. Part of the work we do on the core-four is managing the constantly changing components of the ingredients to maintain the taste experience. People don’t realize how difficult it is to maintain the flavor profile when every component we buy is subject to the same rations as we are. I might have to buy my cheese powder from Mexico on Tuesday and from Madagascar on Thursday. The rations might be able to supply me with our prime maltodextrin this week, and a sub-prime maltodextrin next week. A lot of the ingredients that you see on the label are mainly to allow some flexibility in the surface moisture, flavor retention, packing variances, and everything else that will change the flavor of that chip.

I’ll know about a new directive from High Coast Brands when suddenly all of my prime suppliers are available. They seem to pull some strings for me when they introduce a new nutritional or pharma, because it gives me more worker hours to focus on the getting the floating flavor out the door with the new additive. Generally, I don’t know what in the bulk additives. The entire month’s supply of additives come in a single envelope, it’s about as much micronized powder as you would fit in about five of those little packs of sugar. Figure about three grams of sugar in each, so about fifteen grams total micronized power. It’s hard to imagine that only fifteen grams is enough to supply a quarter of the country’s population for a month, but that’s the seed envelope. We cut that power with mostly cornstarch, then we add the stabilizers and matrix lock ingredients so the micronized powder doesn’t bind too much or create secondary structures. But that original fifteen grams, that’s the actual additive. So figure our territory is say ninety million people, and our current penetration is one-third, or thirty million people customers. Our average adjusted delivery is nine chips per customer per day. Take that fifteen grams, convert to kilograms, divide that by our thirty million customers, you get five hundred times ten to the negative twelfth kilograms per customer per month. Then divide by thirty, and then by nine chips, and you get about two times ten to the negative twelfth kilograms of micronized power per chip. That comes to about two trillion molecules of the additives per chip. That’s far more than is actually needed to produce the clinical result, but when it’s broken down like this, it’s easy to see why they only need to send us such a tiny amount. The envelope is normal, the micronized powder has tracers in it that are keyed to the production facility. So when I get the envelope in the mail, I shake up the internal packet and feed a sample to the sensor. It reads the tracer mark, and then I call up High Coast Brands and read the mark over the phone, letter by letter to the agent there. If it matches, then the machine gets the unlock signal, and then that month’s powder is authorized into the manufacturing. The tracers will continue to check for contaminants through the manufacturing process. As far as I know, this method cannot be tampered. But I’ve had a few young criminals who we employ to find security holes, and they’ve found two different ways to circumvent the security. So it’s possible. Hopefully the concentrations are low enough that this isn’t an attractive option, and the Lentilevers will make trouble for someone else other than me. And while I don’t know what’s inside of each powder shipment, I can get a rough idea by looking at the mass spec analysis, which has to be supervised by a human under both our rules and the national rules. It’s usually a cocktail of inoculations, some biometric tracers, some test pharmaceuticals and the mass psychology patches. The biometric tracers are easy to recognize, because they spike at the same mass number each time, they haven’t really started to hide the signature on those because there has been no tampering. The inoculations are easy to recognize after a few years because I’ll see those spikes show up before flu and tuberculosis season. The test pharmaceuticals are easy to find because they always load them into the statutory limit of no more than twenty percent mass. The psychology patches are whatever is left over.

I hope that answers your question. If you want to avoid the additives, purchase the flavors from the core-four, but not the floating flavor. If total purchase of the additive flavor falls below seventy-eight percent though, then we will have to start adding it to the other three flavors. If you and your friends don’t want to be dosed, then just buy a lot of the floating flavor and eat them when you don’t need a clear head.