Drexel University Food Lab Partnership Brings Spice to New York City

Several projects and products come out of Drexel University’s Food Lab every year, but the most recent one has a new kick to it. As part of a project with longtime client St. Lucifer Spice Company, a Philadelphia-based company that specializes in hot sauces, Matt Schaffner, a second-year master’s student in culinary and food science from the College of Nursing and Health Professions, developed an apple-based habanero hot sauce for boutique New York City hotel Nine Orchard.

You can find the Drexel-made sauce on tables at Nine Orchard’s restaurants, or on St. Lucifer’s website.

Drexel’s Food Lab, a faculty-mentored interdisciplinary food product design and culinary innovation lab founded in 2014 by Director Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, professor in the Department of Food and Hospitality Management, maintains a client list of businesses local, national and around the world. It has partnered with St. Lucifer for at least a decade. In the past, Drexel students have developed a steak sauce, spice blends and others. This was the first project that Schaffner started on at the Food Lab.

“It was representative of projects at Food Lab in a lot of ways, but I think they were a particularly great client to work with,” said Schaffner. “It helps that they're local for tastings. They were involved in helping us get to what would actually work for them.”

Schaffner and a few other students were responsible for developing a signature hot sauce for the Nine Orchard hotel, which is housed in the iconic, century-old Jarmulowsky Bank Building on Orchard Street in New York City. Nine Orchard connected with St. Lucifer, who already had a connection to the Food Lab, and the students began work on an apple habanero hot sauce.

“Nine Orchard wanted the apple because of their story and brand, and St. Lucifer wanted habanero because they build their brand on habanero spices, so it was a marriage of the brands,” Schaffner said.

Schaffner appreciated the diversity of perspectives that came into developing the sauce. St. Lucifer gave some ideas to work with, and the students played around with some big ideas and different styles for about a month, making samples and tasting them internally. One student brought in apple juice as the primary sweetener, slightly changing the character of the flavor and making it fruitier.

The official testing with St. Lucifer included six sauces, with the winning choice one that Schaffner had spearheaded — a thicker, sweeter sauce, he said.

“It was cool to get perspective about figuring out how to get the sauce to the texture that they wanted and keeping it fresh and interesting while also being shelf stable, so I had to keep some technical considerations in mind while also getting something that tastes good,” Schaffner said. “St. Lucifer being able to bring us together with Nine Orchard was a great opportunity, and it’s amazing that it’ll be out on tables in a nice restaurant and not just in online retail.”

Schaffner just wrapped up a graduate co-op at Campbell’s, where he conducted research and development (R&D) in snacks. He worked mostly on Goldfish crackers, but helped out on other cracker types. When he was hired for that co-op, the team at Campbell’s said it was his experience doing similar R&D work, like the hot sauce project, in the Food Lab that got him in the door. He is considering returning to Campbell's, and feels confident about how Drexel’s program has set him up for his career.

“This project helped me get my bearings and gain some confidence,” Schaffner said. “I hadn’t done any food science before the hot sauce project. I was in marketing before I went back to school. I’ve always liked food, and I wanted work that was a bit more hands-on. I was reading ‘The Noma Guide to Fermentation’ book that mentioned a staff food scientist, and I was like, that exists? I didn’t know those words went together. Within a year I was in school.”