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James Gratzik

James "Jim" Gratzek, Ph.D., is Director of the University of Georgia's Food Product Innovation and Commercialization Center (FoodPIC) in Griffin, Georgia.

Sep 15, 2026

13:09
He gives us the rundown of this incredible facility.
13:12
So this facility, UGA Food Innovation Center, also called Food Pick, is here to really get folks started from concepts, working with others, bar designers, flavor companies, packaging companies, putting it into a format that can be scaled up, and then doing a scale up like this.
13:37
In a real live bar factory, Those might create 1,000 bars, 400, 500 bars a minute.
13:45
We'll be lucky if we get 10 or 20 off this line, but that's enough to get started and create some legitimate sales samples, marketing samples, and eventually samples that will be sold in a store to do market validation.
14:01
At that point, Mr. Kelly will have his plant up in Covington, And I suspect we'll be involved there in translating what we've learned here into that plant.
14:14
And there'll be some learning there as well.
15:24
After preparing the dry and wet ingredients, it's time to mix them together.
15:28
We're doing the final mix of the dough, which we'll place in a surge container and then it will go into the extruder.

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