E X PE RT voices What does your job entail on a daily basis? Allison Oesterle: My job title encompasses a lot; my job means a lot of different things to me. The QA side of my job title means that I am responsible for all food safety and quality related to our food. The product development side means that I am responsible for any commercialized or manufactured product, so I work closely with our suppliers to take our in-house recipes and scale them up to something that can be produced in a manufacturing setting. There isn't necessarily a typical day. I divide my time between QA tasks and product development. Typically, I spend the first couple of hours of the day reviewing any food safety audits that our locations received the day before. We have a regularly scheduled Thursday morning meeting for tasting any new items that we have in the works, so my week will be geared towards getting products in line for those meetings. Which innovations are you most proud of? How do you ensure a smooth introduction to market? Ms. Oesterle: From a product standpoint, I'm especially proud of our recent national menu innovation, Chick'n Bites. This is a project that was really my baby from day one - taking on the responsibility to both develop the flavor profile and find a way to work in a new and procedure-intensive product into our cooking line. It was also an incredibly long process as the development of Chick'n Bites was about 12 months, and that was just the Discover what's possible with Passionfruit. Subscribe to the iTi Innovation blog for Passion Fruit applications and more on all tropical fruit trends. ititropicals.com/bloghttp://www.ititropicals.com/blog