Case study

Nine recipes in a week. A standing ovation in the Nordics.

How Nali Consulting used Canoli to take a major European dairy brand from brief to showcase.

Andre Dwomoah, Ella Marshall and Natalie Alibrandi of Nali Consulting, smiling in white lab coats.
Client
Nali Consulting, food and drink science agency
Project
Rapid prototyping for an international food showcase
Team
UK and the Netherlands

About Nali Consulting

Nali Consulting is a food and drink science agency. It takes products from early concept to commercialisation for clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, covering market research, formulation, sample creation, nutritional analysis, supply chain and packaging compliance.

It is run by founder and CEO Natalie Alibrandi, who led QA, innovation and R&D at Vita Coco through its IPO growth phase. The team works across the UK and the Netherlands.

The challenge

As Nali's client list and project complexity grew, the manual work grew with it.

Ingredient data was typed into spreadsheets again and again to calculate each nutrition profile. Regulatory claims were worked out by hand in the same spreadsheets, and several people had to check them before anything went to a client. Every bespoke project repeated that work.

Why Canoli

Nali reviewed several tools. Some pitched themselves as a near replacement for a formulation team. Canoli was built to make expert developers faster, which is what Nali wanted.

Enterprise systems were out of reach for an agency or a challenger brand. Canoli gave Nali the core of that capability at a subscription price.

After a short learning period, formulation, nutrition analysis and compliance became one task instead of three. Every recipe version now shows its nutrition status, and what has to change, and by how much, to hit a target claim.

The project: a showcase sprint

A major European dairy brand asked Nali for new product concepts across sweet and savoury dairy applications. The samples were for an international showcase in the Nordics.

5 weeks, brief to showcase

  1. 1 wk Formulate
  2. 3 wk Adjust
  3. 1 wk Samples
  1. Rapid prototyping for an internal presentation with collaborators
  2. Adjusting recipes to hit the nutrition claims in the client brief
  3. Samples for internal review
  4. Making the agreed changes
  5. Scaling recipes up for the showcase

The team recalculated every formula live as they changed it, and generated nutrition panels, ingredient declarations and regulatory claims from the same recipe. They combined Nali's own ingredient data with trusted public databases, then turned out a one-page summary per concept.

Natalie Alibrandi, smiling in a white shirt in front of an ivy wall.

In Natalie's words

“Invaluable. It would be at least another headcount.”

Natalie Alibrandi, Founder and CEO, Nali Consulting

“The enterprise tools are simply out of reach at $200K+.”
“Probably about a month for this project. Industry ballpark for corporate innovation is 3 to 5 years; we typically work in 6 months.”

Where it helps most

Regulatory compliance comes first: sugar taxes, HFSS rules and red dye bans are forcing reformulation around the world. After that, fast prototyping, all product data in one place, and no more manual Excel.

Who it's for

Natalie sees challenger brands and SME ingredient companies as Canoli's natural customers, priced out of enterprise systems but under the same regulatory pressure.

The next products inherit everything the previous ones learned.

Start with one recipe. Keep the reasoning with it. See what the next one starts from.

Start your free month

One month free. No card needed.

We use a couple of cookies on this site.

One keeps you signed in. The others are analytics from Google and Microsoft that help us see which pages are useful. We only set the analytics ones if you say yes. Read the privacy policy.