R&D Radio: Colleen Cottrell, Independent Consultant at C Cottrell Consulting

The Startup CPG Podcast

Startup CPG

Startup, Food, Business, Beverage, Cpg, Entrepreneurship

4.9 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of R&D Radio, hosted by food scientist Adam Yee, Adam sits down with Colleen Cottrell, independent consultant at C Cottrell Consulting. With over a decade of experience spanning ingredient suppliers, finished CPG brands like RXBAR, and now independent consulting, Colleen breaks down one of the most underappreciated forces in product development: ingredient functionality — and why understanding it early is the difference between a product that scales and one that falls apart at the co-manufacturer.

Colleen explains why the same protein can behave completely differently depending on how it's been processed — heat, pressure, and shear all play a role — and walks through simple, low-cost assays that founders can run themselves to compare ingredients before committing to a formula. She also shares the inside story of helping RXBAR expand beyond bars into oats and other categories by working closely with ingredient suppliers to engineer egg white functionality at scale.

Listen in as they discuss:

What ingredient functionality actually means — and why it impacts your product more than you think
How heat, pressure, and shear change protein behavior (using eggs as the perfect example)
Liquid vs. dried egg whites: shelf life, moisture content, and functional tradeoffs
Why two pea proteins with the same label can perform completely differently
Simple DIY assays for foaming, gelling, and solubility — no lab required
The RXBAR oats story: engineering egg white functionality for new categories
How to set your non-negotiables before you scale
Current trends: protein and fiber maxing, the return to whole/real ingredients, and food-as-health
PDCAAS scores and why protein quality matters more than protein quantity
Why soy is dominating the protein trend — and what fibers are showing up most

Episode Links:

Colleen Cottrell — Independent Consultant, C Cottrell Consulting

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleencottrell

🔗 Email: colleen@cottrellconsult.com

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Show Links:

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Episode music by Super Fantastics

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think it's important to not be married to what you're making on the bench in your kitchen aid.
0:14.6	And the reason I say this is as you scale up, your product is inherently going to change.
0:20.2	I hate to break it to you. There's absolutely
0:21.9	no way that what you're making on the bench is going to be a one-to-one replica when you're making
0:27.7	it at scale. And so don't be married. But you also do need to have quality standards. You can't
0:33.7	be cutting corners left and right because before you know, you're going to have a product that's not even like the one you were selling in. And then that's a completely different issue. So when you're making the product on the bench, what I like to say is think to yourself, what is making your product unique and then start ranking by here are my non-negotiables that I am not going to sacrifice on, whether that's flavor, whether that's the label,
0:55.6	whether that's sourcing, whether that's a texture. Figure what those are out early on so that when
1:00.4	you are making those stepwise scalability or stepwise scaling processes, you're making sure that
1:07.0	you're prioritizing what needs to be the same and what can change by 5-10%.
1:12.6	Hey everyone, this is Adam Yee. Food scientists and podcast hosts of Start of CPG's new podcast
1:19.4	section, R&D Radio, where you interview food scientists and product developers and what they
1:24.5	do and how they can help you build your CPG business. Today I'm interviewing
1:29.6	Colleen Cottrell, Independent Consultant under Cotrell Consulting, to talk about ingredient
1:34.6	functionality and how you should event your ingredients. What's the difference thing in these two
1:38.8	proteins that you get in a bag from a random person? We discuss what we do as food scientists to kind of figure that out.
1:46.1	And that involves a few experiments.
1:48.1	Colleen is a food scientist who focuses on developing and commercializing better-for-you products
1:53.0	with more than a decade of experience across ingredient suppliers and Finnish CPG brands
1:58.0	at both startups and large global companies.
2:01.4	She brings a unique perspective on translating ingredient functionality into scalable products.
2:07.2	Today she works with ingredient innovators and CPG brands to bring better for you products
2:12.1	to market faster.
	...

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