Within the innovation kitchen of Shake Shack

What’s it like to design merchandise for the gourmet burger company Shake Shack, a cult favorite? With its Angus beef burgers, crinkle-cut fries, and frozen custards, the eatery has garnered a devoted customer base since its opening. R&D personnel like Allison Oesterle, Shake Shack’s senior director of product development and quality assurance, are essential to the company’s continued success because it is now recognized as much for its high-quality classics as it is for its time-limited sales and buzzworthy partnerships.

After being hired in 2015 as a senior manager of culinary R&D, Ms. Oesterle was given a promotion to director and is now in charge of the product development team for the fast-casual business that is growing quickly.

“I was searching for a business that shared my values, and Danny Meyer’s and Shake Shack’s perspectives on hospitality spoke to me.”Ms. Oesterle has been instrumental in creating new menu items, such as the hand-breaded, sous-vide-cooked chicken breast known as Chick’n Bites. She establishes procedures for the development, testing, and implementation of products and guarantees quality control both locally and globally.

Today, the brand boasts 148 domestic and 77 international outlets in addition to a new Innovation Kitchen in Manhattan. It began as an actual shack in 2004—a kiosk owned by Chef Danny Meyer in Madison Square Park. Ms. Oesterle provided Food Business News with insights on her experiences working with the renowned chef, implementing culinary innovations, andcontributing to the history of the hamburger.

Food Business News: What are the daily responsibilities of your position?

Oesterle Allison: My job has many facets, and I associate it with many distinct meanings. My work title, which includes quality assurance, indicates that I am in charge of all matters pertaining to food safety and quality. Since I oversee all commercialized and manufactured products as part of my role in product development, I collaborate closely with our suppliers to take our proprietary recipes and scale them up so they can be produced in a manufacturing setting.

A regular day isn’t necessarily present. I split my time between working on products and doing quality assurance. I usually check any food safety audits that our locations got the previous day within the first few hours of the day. Ours is aI will spend my week getting products ready for our regularly planned Thursday morning meetings when we will taste any new items that we are working on.

Which inventions make you the happiest? How can a seamless launch into the market be ensured?

Mrs. Oesterle: I’m very proud of Chick’n Bites, a recent national menu innovation, from a product perspective. Taking on the duty to both develop the flavor profile and discover a means to integrate in a new and procedure-intensive product into our cooking line, this project has been really my baby from the beginning. The development of Chick’n Bites took about a year, and that was only the start of the process to see whether we could make this work globally. This added to the tremendously long process.

Since I started working at Shake Shack, one of my key priorities has been to set up procedures for how we develop and test products. Having effective procedures in place is essential to ensure that the adoption of a New menu item implementation can go well.

In the new NYC Innovation Kitchen, what is your role?

Mrs. Oesterle: In the Innovation Kitchen, which reopened in the autumn, I assist our team of culinary innovators in developing new products and ideas. We can test some of the menu items in the West Village Shake Shack right above us thanks to the new kitchen in the basement. [The third floor houses the home office.] This gives us the ability to swiftly adjust the menu in response to fresh ideas and to determine the level of interest from customers. After conducting a pilot test in the West Village, we will assess whether the product has the potential to be spread to other areas and initiate the process of conducting a scaled-up and comprehensive test of the product.

How do you contribute to the creation of a limited-time offer?

Mrs. Oesterle: Our team comprises culinary, product development, and quality assurance professionals. Leading the innovative side of development are culinary director Mark Rosati and executive chef John Karangis. The innovation and commercialization aspects of what we do were less clearly defined before we moved to the Innovation Kitchen and hired John. Although we constantly strived for creativity and innovation, we always kept the constraints of cost and operational feasibility in mind. John and Mark are free to create with less restrictions on their inventiveness thanks to the division of functions. It is up to me and my team once they have generated a notion or idea and it has been evaluated from a flavor and appeal standpoint.

To what extent does brand success depend on flavor and appearance standardization?

Mrs. Oesterle: We place a great deal of importance on product quality and consistency. We go above and above to ensure that our signature products are as similar as possible from location to location because we want our visitors to be able to travel the world to visit our locations and have a true Shake Shack experience. In addition to making sure that items are regularly manufactured to our specifications and that the facilities adhere to our standards for food safety and quality, my responsibilities also include working with our supplier partners to commercialize recipes.

How has working for and with Chef Danny Meyer taught you?

Ms. Oesterle: I believe the most important lesson I’ve learnt is the value of business culture and hospitality. It’s been an honor to contribute to the company’s overall success on a culinary level, as a strong culture is a defining factor in the success of both personnel and the business as a whole.