Camryn Granger is a food scientist and currently serves as a restaurant solutions advisor at Cargill. Her work helps make sure food is nutritious and tastes good. KMUW’s Carla Eckels sat down with Camryn recently to learn more about the science behind food processing for this month’s “In The Mix.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does a food scientist do?
Camryn Granger: It all depends … on what products they support, but a food scientist is a product developer. So, we are the ones behind the scenes creating the formulations, testing different ingredients on a benchtop.
What is a benchtop?
That's going to be like your smaller-scale work where you'll go into a kitchen, and you make a small food product. If everything tastes great, then a food scientist would make that [on a] larger scale, of course, for commercialization. So, we would then go to something like a pilot plant and then go even higher to a big plant facility to mass-produce.
What made you interested in becoming a food scientist?
All of my passions started in middle school, so I was big in the agriculture program that my middle school had. It was called Future Farmers of America, and fortunately, it bled into high school as well. I stayed in the program, and I was really prominent when it came to … being around animals; showing animals at the fair. But I always really enjoyed the idea of bridging food and animal science together, so that's where food science and meat science came into play for me in my career. I graduated from Tuskegee University with my bachelor’s in animal science and went on to get my master’s degree from Texas A&M University in meat science. I thought that was the perfect way to bridge my love for animal science and food science.
As a young girl, were you interested in learning more about food? How did that all come about?
My dad is a chef by trade, so I grew up in the kitchen watching him and just really enjoying cooking myself, so I’ll say that’s where my love for food came. I would also say because of my diverse background, especially being from Miami — which is a cultural melting pot, I felt like I could bring a lot of insight into my role in what I do because there are so many ingredients and spices that may not be regularly in your products, but I thought that was fun to bring that knowledge to my teams.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Now that I’m in this new role as a Restaurant Solutions Advisor, I’m going to different McDonald’s stores to support the McDonald’s Business Unit that Cargill supports; McDonald’s corporate end. I will go into a store, help certain crews and managers with any issues or anything they need support with behind the counter. I help with any troubleshooting or any new menu items or things of that sort. But as a food scientist, I would do a lot of formulations, so that mad scientist type of energy, where I’d get a project from a customer, and they may ask to change an ingredient in an existing item or make something more flavorful.
You’ve got to give us an example!
So a customer may reach out and say, “We really like this existing item that we have, but we’ve been getting feedback from the consumer that it’s too salty.” So if Cargill, for example, is already the supplier of that existing item, we can go in our database, find the formulation, and look into how to reduce the sodium. So that would be the role of a food scientist, just to kind of tweak things a bit or enhance flavors.
How do you balance making foods taste good while also making them healthier?
For that we definitely have to stay present and staying aware of the trends going on, what is in our ingredients, so a food scientist would work cross collaboratively with other parts of our team so regulatory would help us create an ingredients statement, they would give us advice on what ingredients we could use or should use, what the commercial market is looking and for and wanting, they’ll provide insights, we’ll work with our chefs and culinary team, we’ll work s, just multiple people to give us advice on that.
What should we pay attention to when reading food labels?
Pay attention to the ingredient statement; when it comes to the order of the ingredient statement, whatever is first is what's most prominent in the food. So, if water is the first one, that's a great thing. That means it's a lot of water in that food product, and then you can kind of read the ingredient statement from there, like in hierarchy order. So that's something to know. And then also, there's a fun little trick that you can do for the nutrition statement, so where it shows your calories, say if something has 120 calories, but then has maybe 13 grams of protein, that would be a high protein source because all you have to do is drop the zero in 120, so that's 12, and then compare it to the grams of protein, and if grams of protein is 13, then it's more than 12, for example. So that's how you know something is rich in protein.
What is one fact about food that may surprise people?
I think a lot of people believe that fruits, for example, have too much sugar. So if you have certain health issues, to be careful with too much fruit or certain foods that you eat. But I am a big advocate of eating whole foods and making sure you have a balanced diet because I think that’s a big misconception about sugars. There is such a thing as healthy sugars and healthy fats.
If you could invent one food product, what would it be?
Maybe a superfood. I really love foods like avocados and berries that have a bunch of nutrients packed in, so some type of like dissolvable superfood that you can pop in your mouth, and it gives you all of the nutrients for the day.
What has been the most rewarding part of your career?
I think the most rewarding part is just being the representation I wish I had seen growing up. So, as an African American woman in STEM and in the food industry … I am getting to know so many other beautiful Black women who are educated and who also do what I do, and so I just want to continue to expose that this is definitely a career path that other Black children can do as well, and that it's okay to go to school for this, and it's fun, and you may be called a nerd, but it is so rewarding. I want to emphasize that children need to be exposed to the sciences and know they too can do it.
