Imagine you're the general manager of a chain of buffet-style family restaurants. One of the dozens of items offered on your buffet is a cheese sauce, which customers pour over their baked potatoes or veggies. A customer going through the food line will see this sauce, quickly determine if it looks tasty and may take a spoonful.

Jill Miller, AG '97, may be responsible for a customer deciding to go for that sauce.

As a research and development manager/food technologist for Michigan Dessert Corp. in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Miller and her peers are often faced with detective-like challenges to create food products that meet very specific criteria.

Take that cheese sauce, for example. It has to look just so, Miller says. "The client will come to us and say, 'We want this cheese sauce to be able to stay on a warmer at our salad bar for up to eight hours...and during that time, it can't dry up and it can't melt down. What can you do for us?'"

Michigan Dessert Corp. is small but mighty, according to Miller, and heavily focused on consumer satisfaction. Going head-to-head against much larger companies, Michigan Dessert--which has only 25 employees--develops dry dessert and sauce mixes for restaurant chains and food service companies.

Sometimes, the six employees who work in the lab, including Miller, will find the requested products easy to create.

"It can be something like making a dry mix out of a liquid recipe for, say, Teriyaki sauce," Miller explains. "Many times, we already have products in formulation. Other times, we're asked to make something exclusively for a company that cannot be replicated for another customer."

Miller, who grew up in Laurel, Md., knew by the time she graduated from high school that she wanted to have a food science career.

"It's equal parts chemistry and biology, both of which interested me," Miller says. "Plus, it was something tangible. I eat food, I know food. I was like, 'This seems kind of fun.'"

Of equal importance, Miller says, was the career potential that would come with her degree. "There are so many directions you can take it--research and development, quality assurance, restaurant management. There were many opportunities, in fact, that I hadn't even thought about as a student," she says.

In the summer between her junior and senior years at Delaware, Miller worked as a quality assurance lab technician at East Coast Ice Cream in Laurel. There, she did everything from analyzing butter fat content to taking part in hourly floor checks for product quality.

"It was a great learning opportunity," says Miller, who also was a lab tech at UD's Department of Food Science her senior year.

"Delaware gave me an excellent foundation for learning the fundamentals of food science," she says. When she was a senior, Miller saw an ad for what would be her first job at Michigan Dessert--that of laboratory technician.

"Michigan Dessert was a young company growing very fast," she says. "Because they were getting me right out of school, they didn't have to 're-program' me. They could train and shape me to fit their goals."

Initially, Miller's job involved making sample mixes from already developed prototypes to send to clients. From there, she learned about product optimizations--taking an existing formula and improving its quality.

"As I learned about all the ingredients and their functions, the projects progressed," she says, adding that developing a new project is a genuine group effort.

"We get requests from our Marketing Department for a project, R&D discusses these projects at our weekly meetings and everyone adds their input as we go along," Miller explains. "When we make up a prototype, everyone in R&D tastes it, critiques it and we try again. Sometimes, we get things in one go. Other times, it can take several tries."

The food technologists also rely on their ingredient suppliers to give feedback on how their products can help solve the taste "puzzle." Michigan Dessert Corp. offers mixes for everything from puddings to breads. Many of the products are "add-water-only," meaning that traditional baking ingredients such as eggs and baking soda have already been integrated into the mix. And, there are always new formulations being created--for everything from mousse to brownies to coffee drinks, Miller says.

At Michigan Dessert, Miller says she's learned a tremendous amount about product development and food ingredients. Her job now entails visiting customers for product training.

"Some customers will want to do top-end mixes, and others--say, a prison--will look for less exotic ingredients," she says. "Each request is different and each customer--no matter what they're looking for--is treated with equal importance."

Miller says she especially enjoys the "puzzle-solving" aspect of her job. For example, a client that makes quiches might come to Michigan Dessert hoping to find a solution to its dilemma. When the client company mixes the quiche mix in large vats, the vegetables sink to the bottom, resulting in some pies having more veggies than others.

"The challenge is making the quiche liquid thicker so that the vegetables will float, but you don't want the quiche's density itself to be thicker," she explains. "Sometimes, it requires a good amount of brainstorming with our vendors to come up with the solution. In a case like that, our suppliers will explain how their products work so we can find the right solution that will let us give our customer what they want and need."

Ultimately, the finished mix will give a client "consistent results each and every time," she says.

"That's vitally important...ensuring that what they get will work for them consistently," Miller says.