The Beverage Master – Ensuring Your Drink Tastes Perfect

The Unseen Expert Behind Your Drinks While consumer-facing figures often get the spotlight,the beverage industry relies on experts working behind the scenes. This article profiles Mr. Ng Yew Khoon, a senior R&D beverage technologist at Pokka, whose scientific skill and refined palate ensure products like PoMee Soy and Noyu Nophlex are stable, safe, and delicious for millions of consumers.

The Core Mission: Stability and Safety Before any product launch,Mr. Ng and his team are tasked with ensuring beverages not only taste right but are also perfectly safe to drink over their shelf life. This involves precise scientific methods and extensive taste-testing to overcome unique challenges for each product, often through a lengthy process of trial and error.

The Science of Flavor and Spoilage Using modern laboratory equipment,the team analyzes, simulates, and replicates flavors while rigorously testing for spoilage.

· Meticulous Checks: Every aspect of a beverage—taste, mouthfeel, and aroma—is scrutinized.

· Learning Spoilage: A key skill is learning to identify the faintest hints of spoilage, such as an off-taste or strange smell, which sometimes involves deliberately tasting spoiled products like milk to understand how they behave.

The Art and Science of Ingredients A major challenge is balancing natural and artificial ingredients.

· Natural vs. Artificial: Natural ingredients (e.g., Japanese plum, honey) provide distinctive flavors but can be unstable. Artificial flavors are more robust but can taste "fake" to some consumers.

· The Goal: The team works to mix ingredients to mimic homemade flavors while ensuring they perform well under various conditions.

Rigorous Testing Protocols The development process is data-driven and rigorous:

· Spoilage Tests: Drinks are stored at different temperatures and humidity levels to study how they deteriorate.

· Simulating Reality: Conditions during transport and storage (e.g., hot trucks) are simulated to ensure products survive the journey to the consumer.

· Taste Panels: Team members in semi-isolated booths regularly sample products from test tubes to identify any deviations in color or flavor.

Learning from Failure Not all experiments succeed.Mr. Ng cites a failed high-protein soy drink that tasted good initially but turned lumpy and sour after a few weeks. Such failures are critical learning opportunities that highlight the complexity of ingredient interaction and the necessity of science to solve these puzzles.

Translating Ideas into Recipes The R&D team acts as a translator,converting requests from marketing or management (e.g., "a low-sugar, refreshing yuzu drink") into scientifically sound recipes. This requires deep knowledge of ingredients, consumer preferences, and rigorous testing protocols to ensure a product remains enjoyable for months.

Conclusion: An Indispensable Role The job has its occupational hazards,like dealing with exploding bottles and sour odors. However, the satisfaction comes from seeing a successfully launched product on shelves, enjoyed by thousands. As consumer demand for variety and healthier options grows, the work of beverage technologists like Mr. Ng remains indispensable to every bottle and can produced.