And how long does that process usually take? Well, for a new ice cream flavor to come to the store could take anywhere from six to 12 months.

So what should a reader seeking to recruit and build a culinary development team know before beginning? More of the schools than ever are turning their attention to culinary students toward the R&D stream. There’s a lot more talk of this idea of “culinology,” this marriage of food science and culinary arts.

Where can we see culinology in action? I think really some places you can go to see it living in action, one of them is Baskin Robbins and Dunkin’ Donuts. Essentially you can see culinology coming to life here. I think it’s a combination of being the right-sized company and that it’s a reflection of our senior leadership, that they are very grounded in the idea that we will fuel the success of our business with great flavorful and distinctive menu items and that the way to get there is through this approach of culinology, that we combine chefs and food scientists.

You see it in some professional organizations that are emerging. You see it as companies continue to shape and reshape the way they do business in a very modern world. There’s more big manufacturing companies that have chefs as part of their organization that support the efforts and development work of the R&D teams within companies. We work with a couple of companies that have that so we have a real direct bridge into that manufacturing partner.

How difficult is it to get the right chef with the right brand? It takes a really clear understanding of the brand’s history, what they’ve stood for and where they’ve been, and a real clear look at where the brand is today and what direction they want to head in. How does this chef coming into our quick-serve brand help us meet those business goals? Chefs are pretty savvy about business goals. Our flavors, our creative process, the new menu items that we create, we certainly want them to hit up against those strategic business goals because that’s the ultimate win-win.

I think you could also ask the question of what do chefs bring to the quick-service segment and how is that new and changing? As we’ve seen more chefs enter into the R&D side of product development, we’ve seen a lot of changes and a lot of changes around flavor and uniqueness and quality of flavors. You know, pushing for some innovation around manufacturing. I think those are a couple of key areas where chefs have made a real impact in R&D.

The National Restaurant Association (NRA) is hailing 2008 as the year of the bite-size dessert. What are your thoughts on that prediction? Choices all around the menu are, I think, key to success with the customer. The customer really wants to have choices that help them feel like they are meeting whatever their needs or desires are at the moment. So, whether that’s a small portion or whether that’s something that’s incredibly portable and I can drive with it because that’s what I need to do, I think that where Baskin-Robbins is is offering those choices to our customers. So the National Restaurant Association’s statement is kind of a blanket statement. I think you’ll see a lot more attention given to smaller portions, bite size and maybe even menu categories, but grazing—tapas—these are not brand-new categories.

So the NRA is not reinventing tapas? Yeah, snacking is a great occasion. I love snacking all day long. Snacking is a wonderful opportunity for our brands, for Baskin-Robbins, for Dunkin’ Donuts, but will you continue to see other sorts of sweets? Will you continue to see individual full-portion desserts? Will you continue to see beautiful cakes and pies and torts? Yes, of course. We’ll see innovation in all of those categories. Will we get more public attention on snacking and small portion size or serving size or two-bite items? Yeah, I think you’ll see a lot more attention being given to that category, but the others won’t go away.