Darrell Gerdes: Perfection Scientist

Darrell Gerdes, manager of research and new product development for Imperial Sugar Company, inspects a sugar cookie made with SteviaCane.

Like a modern-day Columbo, Darrell Gerdes, manager of research and new product development for Imperial Sugar Company (ISC), spends much of his time troubleshooting, coming up with new ideas and examining the evidence until something “clicks.”

A case in point: Gerdes and an ISC team recently worked with a large commercial customer on a new sugar glaze for the company’s famed glazed doughnuts. The team had not yet gotten the viscosity of the glaze to perform the way they wanted.

“The glaze was giving us a 90 percent performance, but I’m a perfectionist scientist who expects 100 percent performance,” says Gerdes. “We were struggling to figure out why this particular product wasn’t working perfectly. We had changed the formulation, changed the application method and temperature – all sorts of things. It just wasn’t good enough.”

Suddenly, an idea popped into his head: “I thought about the gums in the product, and realized they needed a 24-hour time frame to do their stuff perfectly.” That’s when Gerdes decided to spend three days with the customer, running a test that involved making the glaze, letting it rest for a day, and then applying it to the doughnuts.

“It worked like a champ,” he says.

It’s this sort of scenario that casts Gerdes as a detective of sorts. He says, half-jokingly, “It’s like CSI, except with sugar and sweeteners.”

As a student at Texas A&M, Gerdes originally wanted to be a pediatrician, but soon found himself drawn to food science. After earning his Master’s degree and PhD in food science, he worked as a professor at universities in Texas, Louisiana and California, teaching students and running research centers that conducted research projects for food companies. Eventually, one of those clients lured him to the corporate world.

Gerdes discusses tests on SteviaCane with Imperial's analytical chemist William Kienzle.

After stints at Parrot-Ice and Riviana Foods, Gerdes landed at Imperial Sugar in June 2009. Arriving at the Sugar Land, Texas, headquarters, he recalled touring the site as a Boy Scout and later learning how to drive on Highway 90A, which runs in front of the corporate offices.

What he loves about his role at Imperial Sugar is “creating new stuff and solving problems.” A typical week involves everything from working on new products, to scouring the Internet to read up on the latest food industry trends, to answering questions from customers and consumers.

He says he has three big goals for the year:
One is to launch Steviacane™, a product made from sugar and stevia.

The second is to relaunch Baker’s Supreme with revamped packaging.

And, the third is to develop a tool for online market research, which will be a first foray for Imperial Sugar. “Called a ‘concept screener,’ the online survey will allow us to target consumers by demographic and region and say, ‘Here are our ideas for new products. What do you think?’”

By year-end, Gerdes expects to have targeted market research to help guide him, as well as new ISC products lining retail shelves. He says, “One-hundred-percent performance – that’s what success looks like to me.”