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Posts like this are why I read HN comments first.

Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.

IDK if it'd apply here, but there are technically laws on the books in the US against price and purchase discrimination for grocers. It was specifically one of the things Lina Khan was investigating on the way out of office and something I believe she's going to be using for the NYC grocery stores.

A food seller isn't allowed to cut out a grocer because they are too small. However, I believe they get around this today by having minimum order sizes that make it impossible for a small grocer to handle.

That's effectively how my small hometown grocer was driven out of business. The suppliers refused to work with them because they wanted them to order huge amounts of product that wouldn't work for my hometown with 300 people. So, the people running the store ended up just buying products from either costco or another grocery store a town over. The price hike they had to apply was simply too much for the local folk who ultimately also went to the nearby towns to save money instead of shopping locally.

And I'm guessing, without a local grocery store at the very least, your hometown is also a dying entity?

It's mixed. Several people ended up moving back as some of the older population died off. One new resident retired there and is running a mini-grocery store now as both a hobby and for some of the hunters that come through the town.

But the town is dying/dead. There's really only 1 major business in town and the school. It's surrounded by farm land.

In my father's day, it had everything from a hardware store, full service garage, a bowling ally, movie theater, restaurant, and dance hall. All that is gone now.

In my youth the restaurant and grocery store were still around. You had to call ahead to the restaurant as they would only open in a call ahead fashion.

can't several small hometown grocers get together to be able to make that volume/quantity? Surely that would be better than just buying from costco?

Parent comment said their hometown had 300 people, which I can't imagine would support more than one or, at most, two grocery stores.

That’s exactly what small distributors are for.

A lot of small co-op groceries and even food co-ops that are more like ordering clubs used to use a company called UNFI to put in their orders but I think they focused more on organic and other high end items but they were willing to service smaller stores so yeah it's probable. There was also IGA (independent grocers association) but I think most of the stores associated with that brand/network locally have closed down so not sure if it's a thing anymore. Many of the independent convenience stores here stock almost all of their groceries at Aldi.

I lived in a town with only IGA and Piggly-Wiggly. (And Dollar General, of course). IGA was the best. I really appreciate what they were doing. It appears to still exist.

https://www.iga.com/about

It seems entirely reasonable to me to quote larger prices per item, even much larger prices, for smaller quantities. Or even outright refuse to sell in small quantities.

I mean, my grocer doesn't sell individual beans either. So why should wholesalers be forced?

They don't? I'm in London, and my local grocer will happily sell me one bean if I want. I've bought 1 bird chilli several times.

Sure, if the chili peppers or the beans are not packaged, you could buy as little as you want. Sometimes you might get funny looks, sometimes they'll give you the bean for free as it's not worth the hassle to sell an individual bean.

But what about prepackaged beans, like 500 gram pack? You can't open the package and expect to pay for part of it. Sometimes the beans are packaged by the grocery store with their branding. That's the same as not letting you buy an individual bean.

And it's great that lores found a grocer that caters to their needs. Even less of a reason to make a law to force everyone to do so.

Greatly detailed here:

https://youtu.be/odhVF_xLIQA?t=338

In this case, Pepsi has reduced promotions and increased wholesale cost for "small groceries" which in this case was a regional grocer with ~1000 of stores across 10 states. If Pepsi is strong arming regional giants like that, imagine how the ant of a real local grocer feels. They are algorithmically getting destroyed

> Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using.

That's the key.

I'm not an expert - and have only experience making/mixing liquids for cocktails - but Gum Arabic (often used to add a thicker mouthfeel in sugar syrups) isn't a great emulsifier but needs to be full homogenised with the oils before adding to more liquid - exceptionally high speed, aggressive blending for longer than it looks like is needed, to create tiny droplets which the gum arabic then stabilises, or the oil will end up separating after a few hours/days.

Sucros Esters, Propylene Glycol, or Polysorbate 80 (which I haven't used) probably do a better job but only Sucros Esters could be considered 'natural'

Another fun use for gum arabic is making watercolor paints, you can do it with your kids sourcing the pigment from different soils. pour water and let the heavy big particle fall to the bottom and source the small ones from the top and mix some ingredients

Pigment from soils?

Not sure what you are asking. The stone age way of making paint is to find some place where the ground has a weird colour, dig it up, clean it and you have a pigment.

Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna.

If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.

Yeah I’ll probably stick with coca cola corporation

Okay, but user070223 is talking about watercolour paints as an alternative use of gum arabic.

Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.

Ochre is from a type of clay

Oh! I knew they sold it for art but not why.

What's the use in ice cream?

My ice cream is just ... ice cream. Cream, milk, sugar.

As an emulsifier, allowing the fats and the water to mix better. I _think_ it also might help to trap air bubbles. It helps you turn on the creaminess-knob

Egg yolk is the usual emulsifier, in the UK at least - ice cream is essentially a frozen whipped custard.

That’s also an option. I usually make mine without due to friends with egg allergies and vegan friends

Several reasons. Texture and freeze-thaw stability are the main reasons. The latter being an issue for home use mainly.

Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store.

They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.

Why did you get a commercial bottling license?

Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else.

I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.

The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.

That's a really inspiring story to me. Do you have any more info about your business e.g website or blog? (I realise these are computer things and exactly what you were moving away from.)

Seconded that I'd love to hear more.

A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes.

The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.)

Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots.

With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.

You should get your website up and running and start writing and tell others not only how you made it, but also why. What you felt in this change in your life etc.

I guess a big part of this is figuring out how to make money doing that. I wonder how did you get there.

I've always had the desire to make soft drinks and I have a similar concern about how we are sitting the entire day...

>with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else.

gotta say I don't like Pepsi, but I love Jarritos Cola and Fritz-Kola, they're both bitter enough. Most other Colas I've had in the U.S are too darn sweet.

Fritz-Kola used to be even more bitter, until they dropped the caffeine content to sane levels.

> Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet.

Oh man, that's so me at this stage of my life. But I cannot easily get out of the rat race, with family responsibilities and mortgages and all...

Same here. Despite having intentions of not improving lifestyle with income (so I could be FIRE), it happened anyway with kids. I love my kids (of course) but they are so much more expensive than I ever could have imagined. Cost of living has just skyrocketed in the past 6 or 7 years (cue the 11 year old saying "Siiiiiixxxxx Seeeevvvvvennnn") and wages haven't changed much. Unless something radically changes, I'm chained to this desk for at least then next 10 years.

If I may ask a question…

Nature’s flavors sells both extracts and concentrates that are water soluble. For a brown soda, like rootbeer, is an alcohol based extract preferred or should I go the concentrate route?

I’ve been toying with the idea of making commercial style rootbeer at home, and making soda from roots just doesn’t cut it (even if it’s pretty good). I’ve been eying Nature’s flavors for a while, but since I’m not in the US it will be VERY expensive.

There are no domestics providers of food safe wintergreen or sassafras.

Thanks, and cool career switch!

That’s a good question and it probably depends on the ingredient. Most of what we call flavors are a mix of volatile aromatic compounds. Some of those are fat soluble. Some water soluble.

Alcohol is great for extracting as it can pull out both.

The flavor extracted depends on what you’re extracting with and even the concentration.

So really, you’d have to buy it and try. I’ve only ever made root beer a couple times for my own experimentation with oil.

Nature’s Flavors is awesome though and you might ask them.

I wonder how they pulled off Crystal Pepsi.

A neat trick, even if nobody cared.

The 90's were a magical place. Best we can do now is Clear Pepsi.

Why? Is it just not put caramel coloring in it? It didn't taste like actual Pepsi to me, which I suppose might be more difficult?

The OP said (in the last paragraph) that the ingredients that go into colas are the kind that make the drink cloudy. Crystal Pepsi was clear, even without the coloring.

Presumably it's because they changed to use flavors that are completely water-soluble. That would explain a difference in taste.

(I know they tasted different with my eyes open, but I never did a blind taste test between the two. It would be interesting to know how close they really got to the original flavor.)

Yeah, that would be my guess. Crystal Pepsi tastes noticeably different than regular, and caramel color is used in such small qtys that it is considered borderline flavorless.

If you look at popular grapefruit sodas Fresca is clear, but Squirt is cloudy because Fresca uses water soluble flavors and Squirt uses oils. (Squirt is the better product by far IMO because a lot of the grapefruit flavor is from the oil in the peel.)

It’s always possible the geniuses at the flavor houses Pepsi buys from have some magic I don’t know about though. But I’ve never heard of any way to make emulsified oils clear, since they refract light differently.

Nile Red recreated "cola" drink close enough to the good stuff and of course published the recipe. Might want to try that :)

Darcy O'Neil's "Art of Drink" videos cover this:

The Science Behind Crystal Pepsi: Microemulsion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppufxi1pHu8

>If you've ever asked the question: How do they make Crystal Pepsi clear? Here is your answer. The method is surprisingly simple and uses a technique to make a microemulsion where the droplet size of the flavour oil is around 1 micron. This method comes directly from Pepsi, via a patent they filed in 1989, providing a detailed method for producing oil-in-water microemulsions for beverages. The patent specifically discusses clear colas and methods for producing the same.

>This video is an introduction to creating microemulsions and provides a process for doing it at home with simple equipment and easily available ingredients.

Also:

Emulsion FAQ (Beverages)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRf4ehRPpok

Stable Flavour Emulsion for Soda Syrups and Non Alcoholic Drinks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYToDpVAeMU

Caramel Colouring, Flavouring and Emulsifying Syrup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7OvogWyMDo

What do you use to bottle things in, like what bottles?

Perrier bottles can be emptied and resealed. I didn't see anything in the article about carbonation.

Bottles are easy to find. I homebrew my own ginger ale and use Grolsch-style sealing caps to withstand the pressure. Buy them on Amazon.

Depends what I’m bottling and if it needs to be shelf stable. There’s actually just as much work in the packaging of a beverage as the product sometimes.

What are your, um, favorite gum providers?

Small scale: modernist pantry. Commercial scale: Ingredion’s TIC gums. Their pre-hydrated gum arabic is great.

Is the Modernist Pantry gum arabic pre hydrated?

I’m not sure, but they do sell some pre-hydrated gums and usually call them “perfected”. They are largely buying in commercial quantities and re-packaging for restaurant-scale use with their gums because a lot of the bigger ingredient companies that make the best products won’t sell in smaller than 50 lb (or sometimes even much larger) increments.

Pre-hydrated gums are usually just hydrated and then spray dried ones.

I've used their "perfected" xanthan gum which is a separate SKU from their regular xanthan gum. At least for gum arabic they seem to only offer one SKU, so I'm guessing it's not prehydrated.

All gum arabica comes from Sudan. When the US imposed sanctions on Sudan, this product was exempted.

Ha yeah. That whole thing is kind of crazy.

Thank you for helping contribute to reduced trust in the society. Fuck them big dudes, amirite?

He's contributed to improving trust on this forum. And idk if you've ever gotten commercial samples before but he's right, the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you.

Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?

> the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you.

It’s immaterial to Apple if I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store too.

> Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?

Because he is a commercial bottler who is sampling from different supplier that he intends to source from for his business.