Sexy Little Chemist

I finally pinned down exactly what Brenda does.  A major fruit company that ships fruit nationwide under 5 different labels recently came to the realization that they are suffering minor losses by having to discard aesthetically-displeasing batches/harvests/shipments/whatever—fruit that is technically perfectly good but not fit for stores due to appearance.  The logical remedy?  Start a juice and marmalade company!  Erase the bruises, scratches, and bug burrows by blending it all up, and ultimately provide two new ways for the fruit to pass through the gullets of the masses!

Brenda was hired as one of two chemists tasked with developing the production line, recipes, quality control measures, you name it.  This particular company is hoping to create slightly-unprecedented 100% natural juices, and utterly-unprecedented marmalades that use agave syrup as sweetener (diabetic friendly).  She’s a little doubtful that either is even possible.  Without additives, how can you maintain color/flavor consistency across batches?  I suggested they turn a negative into a positive.  Make some sort of hipster-friendly slogan like “uniformity is NOT 100% natural” and then put a brief discussion about flavor/color subtleties that may be encountered from bottle to bottle, maybe with reference to seasons and weather patterns/conditions.  Sierra Nevada Pale Ale labels contain(ed?) a brief discussion about the layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of each bottle, which looks like dirt and has the potential to gross out customers, and how it’s supposedly testament to the quality of the beer; in reality it’s very possible that leaving some yeast in the bottle simply saves the company time and money.  

Nevertheless, the wealthy 26 year-old son of the fruit moguls who has been put in charge of their new juice/marmalade outpost demands that they give it a shot and doesn’t seem too concerned about cost nor possible unfavorable outcomes.  They have solicited advice from an extremely pretentious PhD from the US, who responded with lengthy (10s of pages) and difficultly-worded emails (even for an English speaker… I mean, come on, he knows he’s sending this to a Mexican company and that his audience, at best, will have command of English as a second language), which we periodically discuss over coffee in the evening.  I think I’ve reached the point where I could possibly consult the next start-up juice factory.