Frozen Foods’ Hottest Chef : Companies Hire Independent Researcher to Design New Dishes

Mimi Tattoli doesn’t look like a person who eats her way through most of every day.

But the 5-foot, 100-pound Tattoli is a self-described “foodie” who spends much of her time eating. Food is both her pleasure and her profession.

It is a combination of genes and the four miles she runs each day that keeps her from ballooning the same way her 7-year-old business has, she said with a laugh while recently showing a guest around the kitchen of her Piccolo Enterprises in Fullerton.

“We eat all day long around here,” said Diana Bogan, who has been with Tattoli ever since she began designing new frozen foods for clients in 1981.

So far, Tattoli’s expertise has been put to work by Lawry’s, which retained her company to develop a line of seasonings; by Amfac, the hotel, restaurant, and food products conglomerate, which hired Piccolo to find ways to use freshwater prawns in its foods; by Van de Kamp’s Frozen Foods, for which she developed a line of Chinese foods, and by All-American Gourmet.

For All-American, Tattoli’s largest client, Piccolo developed the original line of Budget Gourmet frozen entrees and about three dozen additional products, including diet entrees, complete dinners and side dishes.

Tattoli is an accomplished chef, a certified expert taster and a firm believer in the use of fresh, wholesome ingredients in her food. She said her business philosophy is the same as her personal philosophy about cooking: Use fresh ingredients to prepare healthful products that look good and taste good.

“Our goal is to link the artistry of food preparation with the need to serve large-scale amounts. If we in the profession can do that, then we reach the point where you don’t have to be able to cook well in order to eat well.”

So why does she use her talents to design frozen food for the masses?

Well, frozen dinners today bear little relation to the starch-and-gravy TV dinners of the 1950s, she said. And with so many two-worker families, frozen foods enable busy people to eat well without spending all their time and energy preparing meals--or all their money eating out.

“The swing these days is to premium-quality entrees, with top-grade ingredients,” said an editor for Frozen Food Age, a New York-based trade magazine.

It is a $5-billion “cut-throat” market that rewards quality products with hard-to-find space in grocers’ frozen food sections, said Pam Bell, products manager for Tyson Foods in Springdale, Ark.

Most of the major players in that market--Stouffer’s, Campbell Soup (Swanson), Tyson and Conagra (Banquet and Morton’s)--use in-house research and development staffs to design their products.

But Ernest Townsend, founding president of All-American Gourmet, decided to go outside the company to develop Budget Gourmet because he wanted the job done quickly. Today he unabashedly credits Tattoli with laying the foundation for success.

Townsend, recently named president of the frozen foods group of Kraft Inc., which purchased All-American from General Host last year for $296 million, said Tattoli and her crew not only developed the Budget Gourmet line with the speed he had hoped for, but gave it quality and taste.

“That’s where Mimi is special,” Townsend said. “She’s a chef and she understands food. With Budget Gourmet, rather than just creating a product, she really helped create a company.”

For Tattoli, Budget Gourmet has provided a long-term relationship that has pumped considerable cash into her company and helped give her the independence she demands. She said that her business is “very profitable” and that she turns down about 80% of the jobs she is offered.

Tattoli, says Townsend, is a tough businesswoman, but she “doesn’t like watching expense accounts and three-year plans and all the corporate stuff. In fact, she’s got so much business stacked up, she doesn’t even make business plans for her own company. She doesn’t need to.”

She also doesn’t advertise and there’s no sign on the door of her test kitchen located in a small commercial complex in Fullerton.

“We believe in total privacy here,” she said. “When we are cooking, that’s all we want to do. We probably only have people besides us in here maybe three or four times a year.”

Tattoli has a few other rules that her prospective clients must agree to follow if they want her services.

For one thing, she only develops products that use prime, fresh ingredients not only because she believes that they taste better, but because she believes that they help the manufacturer maintain a high level of quality.

“People in the plants where they make the product can tell if there is anything wrong with something that goes in fresh,” she said. “If the milk is curdled, or the cheese is too old, they can see it and smell it. You can’t do that when you use only parts of the real food, like dried sour cream.”

Works Within Guidelines

Tattoli and her staff also create a bit differently from the researchers at companies such as Tyson and Stouffer’s. She never makes up more than a quart or two of any recipe in their test kitchen. The larger test batches that lead up to the first production run are all done at the client’s production site. That, she said, ensures quality control and enables her staff to make adjustments to the recipes so that the final product tastes as close as possible to the initial one-quart “home made” batch.

In designing a product, Tattoli usually receives a set of ground rules from the client--what the product should be, any special ingredients it should contain and how much it should cost at the retail level. Then she, Bogan and Valerie Wong go to work, assisted by Dave Moore, Piccolo’s shopper and food preparation specialist, and Lori McCarty, who sets up the final production specifications.

Bogan said that scores of versions of a recipe are prepared before a final version is picked. Among the things that have to be considered in the preparation are how the ingredients will interact after being frozen and then cooked by the consumer. Some of the ingredients, therefore, are merely blanched; others are cooked to varying degrees so that everything will come out properly when prepared at home.

After the final recipe is selected, Piccolo takes it to the client’s manufacturing plant, where an initial run of about 300 gallons is prepared, tasted, adjusted and tasted again. That process is repeated for weeks, until a first production run of 10,000 cases--or 120,000 individual dinners--is ready.

The entire process, in the case of a new product line, can take more than a year and cost $5 million to $10 million, exclusive of the retail marketing and advertising costs, Tattoli said.

Started as Technologist

Tattoli said she had always been interested in food, although she majored in English for her first two years in college. She grew up in New York and Washington, the daughter of a Chinese diplomat who brought his family to the United States in 1948 when he came to work at the United Nations and who stayed after the Communist Party took power in China in 1949. She graduated from New York University with a degree in food science.

Her first job was in Indiana as a food technologist with the Fleishmann Co. She said her specialty was “fats and oils, but I loved it because I got to bake a lot to see how the various products interacted with flour and other baking products.”

In 1969, Tattoli came to California with her husband and went to work for Hunt Wesson in Fullerton, where she worked in frozen foods, dry foods, oils and fruit products before being singled out as having an exceptional palate.

“They gave tests to all the employees and on the basis of my results, they trained me to be an expert taster,” she said. The job involved more than being able to tell the difference between sweet and sour. Among other things, tasters are used to determine the subtle changes that occur in food products after varying periods of storage so that the shelf lives of products can be determined.

She left Hunt Wesson for Lawry’s, where her expert taster status was used to help create a “sensory department.” She quit in 1980 to study food in Europe for a year and when she returned to Southern California and decided to start her own company, Lawry’s became her first client.

All-American retained her in 1982 to design the Budget Gourmet line, which first hit the retail stores the next year. In its fiscal 1987 All-American reported $195 million in sales from Budget Gourmet.

Developing Products

Although her major work so far has been in frozen foods, Tattoli said she would like to get into fresh product development--foods that can be purchased and eaten on the spot or taken home for lunches or dinners.

She calls them fast foods, but in the context of the Italian deli or the French charcuterie rather than the American hamburger drive-through.

For now, however, Piccolo still works with All-American and is in the midst of a new product development with Van de Kamp’s, which is owned by Pillsbury.

Tattoli recently turned down a potentially lucrative assignment from Kraft. “They wanted us to develop microwave instructions for all of their frozen products. But I refused. There are two things I don’t do well. I burn toast, and I can’t microwave.”