lets get introduced.
There is a neat version of product development in which an idea arrives fully formed, ingredients fall politely into line and everybody shakes hands over the finished thing.
This was not that.
For FLVR_16, we joined Roane Rapson, Head of Food Concepts at GAIL’s, for a day spent rummaging through exceptional produce, interrogating peaches and trying to discover whether mango had any business being involved with fizzy liquid. Gregor brought one of Rapscallion’s original juicers out of hibernation. Roane supplied the butteriest mangoes you’ve ever tasted. Gregor approached flavour through liquid; Roane through the instincts and techniques of a chef. Their backgrounds were different, but the pursuit was one and the same: finding the fullest expression of an ingredient. Between them sat several bags of fruit and no particularly fixed idea of where any of it might lead.
Roane is difficult to introduce through a job title alone. A chef by training and a concept maker by instinct, he has the particular kind of curiosity that prevents an ingredient from remaining simply an ingredient. Within minutes, he is asking where it came from, what heat might reveal and whether its most interesting quality is the one everybody else has overlooked.
That was precisely the point.
This episode is about what happens before a product has a name, a recipe or any obligation to behave itself. The loose, revealing part of the process where two people who care deeply about flavour begin pulling at an idea to see what might be hiding inside it.
PT.1
WHERE FLAVOUR BEGINS
We began at Natoora in Bermondsey, surrounded by the sort of produce that makes sensible plans feel a little limiting. The produce was phenomenal. The choice. The breadth. White peaches, yellow peaches and firm little amarillos, more often cooked or preserved than eaten from the hand. Alphonso mangoes sat nearby with their dense, buttery flesh. There were pomelo grapefruits, tomatoes, apricots and countless other lures to become distracted.
Roane moved through it all with the ease of somebody who does not see ingredients as entries on a purchasing sheet. Each had a season, a grower, a character and a particular way it wanted to be handled.
The question was not simply what it tasted like, but why it tasted that way and what story it might carry. That instinct reaches back to Roane’s time in Berlin, where he worked with an inspiring woman called Ines. Her speciality was using food as a design medium: not simply something to serve, but a way of telling stories about the people who grew it, made it and brought it into being. Ingredients became carriers of place, labour and intent. The finished dish mattered, but so did everything required for it to exist. Roane brought that way of seeing into GAIL’s. He wants to know where the wheat was grown, where the cheese was made, where the milk came from and whose judgement and nurture shaped it along the way.
His work begins with flavour, but it does not end there. The story must be honest enough to survive the product and the product good enough to deserve the story. Roane spoke to us about cheesemakers Mary & Jane Quicke, a 14th generation farm and cheese producer, and through his insight into his relationship with them, made a very clear point. Inspiration does not always arrive by the obvious route. Sometimes a producer, a process or a problem from another corner of food opens a door you did not know you were looking for.
This is one reason GAIL’s and Rapscallion understand one another. We both begin further back than the shelf. Before the bakery counter or the can comes the field, orchard, harvest and decision to choose one ingredient over another. Flavour begins there, long before anybody starts finalising a recipe.
PT.2
CONCEPT, NOT PRODUCT
Roane’s title matters.
“My job title is concept, not product.”
It sounds like a fine distinction until he explains the mechanisms contained within it. Roane and the commercial team consider the what, the why and the when. They shape the idea and establish why it deserves to exist. The product development team must then determine how that idea can be made safely, consistently and thousands of times each day.
An idea can be beautiful in a bowl and useless in a bakery.
Something created instinctively in the GAIL’s Creative Studio must eventually pass through recipe development, sourcing, food safety, commercial planning, operations and the hands of bakers across the country. It needs to retain the quality that made it worth pursuing, while becoming repeatable enough to reach more than one fortunate table.
What sits behind GAIL’s is not a faceless machine, but people: curious, exacting humans passing an idea from one discipline to the next without losing the reason it existed.
The customer sees the final thing. Behind it sits a long sequence of questions, tests, revisions and occasional mourning for ideas that were lovely but simply refused to work at scale.
GAIL’s may be planning almost a year ahead, but the process remains rooted in observation. A customer need. A producer with an unusual ingredient. A problem encountered in a bakery. A conversation that leads somewhere nobody had intended.
There is structure, certainly. But within it, curiosity is free to roam.
PT.3
QUALITY AT SCALE
The scale is different, but the problem is familiar. At Rapscallion, we are hyper reactive by necessity. Fruit ripens when it ripens. Weather changes availability. Growers call. Deliveries move. A raw ingredient can alter the complexion of a production week before we’ve brushed our teeth and put our pants on (backwards usually, depending on the week it’s been).
GAIL’s operates across a far larger estate, yet it is dealing with the same fundamental tension: how do you preserve the life inside an ingredient while building a process responsible enough to repeat? Working with GAIL’s had already changed Rapscallion. We had learnt quickly to plan further ahead, make faster decisions and see ourselves not only as flavour makers, but as manufacturers responsible for protecting flavour under pressure. Roane’s explanation put language around that experience: volume does not diminish creativity, but it demands another kind of it.
Quality at scale is not achieved by making one excellent thing and multiplying it. The recipe must survive volume. The ingredient must remain available. The product must be safe. Thousands of people must be able to make or serve it with the same intention, care and love.
“There’s a certain amount of art in that in itself,” Roane says.
Scaling is often described as an operational achievement, as though the creative work ends once the recipe is approved. Scaling is easily accused of being soulless. In reality, it demands another form of creativity. The original idea must be translated without being arranged into anonymity.
GAIL’s does this thousands of times a day. Rapscallion does it from fruit to can. Both of us know the uncomfortable truth: an ingredient may be natural, but it is rarely obedient.
Thankfully, we like disobedience.
PT.4
FLAVOUR GEEKS
Back at the GAIL’s Creative Studio, the neat line between chef, maker, concept and product began to dissolve. Peaches were squeezed, juiced, heated and roasted. Different varieties offered different balances of flesh, fragrance and natural acidity. One gave up very little liquid but held an extraordinary amount of flavour. Another appeared promising until processing quietly removed the quality that made it interesting in the first place.
That is the difficulty with fruit. Extraction does not simply reveal flavour. It changes it. Heat may draw something deeper from an ingredient while sacrificing its brightness. Cold processing can protect fresh acidity but fail to reach what is held more stubbornly inside the flesh. Texture becomes part of the problem. Colour matters. Separation matters. A delicious liquid that divides itself into several geological layers inside a can is still, regrettably, a headache.
Nothing was treated as failure. Each attempt made the next question more precise. Pomegranate met rose and wanted warmth rather than chilli. Peach was interrogated across varieties and ratios. Herbs, pine and fennel drifted in and out of consideration. Ideas were tasted before they had time to become precious. This is experimentation in its useful form. Not throwing ingredients together for spectacle, but paying close enough attention to notice what is absent.
PT.5
LONDON FIZZY
Gregor brought SaltWater to London, partly as a clean base for the experiments and partly because London tap water is… Not as good as Scottish water. There you go. We said it. London water is rubbish.
Moving swiftly on.
It is Rapscallion’s simplest liquid and its fizziest: Scottish water, Celtic sea salt and a whole load of bubbles. Alongside some “London fizzy”, it became a way of testing how the fruit behaved when carbonation entered the conversation.
An ingredient can feel balanced when still and entirely different once carbonated. Acidity sharpens. Aroma lifts. Texture shifts. Carbonation exposes the balance. Weaknesses have fewer places to hide. Ratios were weighed. Liquids were diluted. Jars were sniffed. Gregor and Roane changed one another’s minds in real time.
Their knowledge overlapped without being identical. Gregor approached the fruit as a drinks maker, alert to extraction, acidity, stability and what might survive the journey into a can, drawing on techniques and theories learnt across wine, beer, spirits and cocktail making. Roane brought a chef’s understanding of heat, texture, seasoning and the less obedient routes by which an ingredient can become more itself. Different disciplines, arriving at the same pursuit: flavour.
Neither spent the afternoon politely confirming what the other already knew. They questioned, corrected and occasionally sent one another back to school. That was where the useful discoveries happened.
The mango proved difficult. Its thickness suggested that a substantial proportion of juice might be needed, but volume alone did not solve it. The flavour remained broad and soft around the edges.
“It needs a leading edge,” Roane said.
“It’s flabby,” Gregor agreed.
What it needed was something green, bright and living. Basil was the obvious suggestion, which briefly counted against it. Then they tried it. Sometimes the obvious answer has the audacity to be right.
PT.6
BANGO WAS HIS NAME, OH?
Mango and basil. Bango.
A name born before there was a finished recipe, reliable process, commercial future or the slightest invitation from anybody responsible for brand governance. But there was something there.
That moment captures what we wanted from this FLVR episode.
Not the grand unveiling of a polished collaboration, because we believe the word collaboration is thrown about all too easily these days. But the beginning of a possibility.
Two flavour obsessives working without a rehearsed conclusion, bringing different instincts to the same ingredients and allowing the idea to change as they tasted.
Gregor began the day admitting that stone fruit had eluded him. Roane did not arrive with the answer.
Together, they found several questions worth carrying back to Rapscallion HQ and testing, trialling and tinkering with further.
Perhaps that is where good products really begin. Not with certainty, but with enough knowledge to recognise an interesting problem and enough curiosity to follow it further. For one day, none of it had to be completely solved. There was fruit on the table, bubbles in the glass and a mango soda beginning to make a peculiar amount of sense.
Do GAIL’s have anything mango based on their menu? Not yet.
