I design products your customers love — and your brand can actually deliver.
An artist who knows how to design great food at scale — crave-able, clean-label, and made to your margin.
Part-time product design for brands that make their product in-house — or need help finding the right co-manufacturing partner.
Designing food is a huge part of my life, and I love doing it — the puzzle of making something genuinely delicious that a real business can actually produce, batch after batch. You know your brand and your customer; I bring the design — backed by real food chemistry — and the production experience to make sure what you make holds up — on brand, on shelf, at scale, and on margin.
Formulation & Product Design
The part I love most: getting flavor, texture, and structure to actually sing — and to live up to your original recipe.
Clean-Label & Allergen Reformulation
Removing what doesn't belong without losing what makes the product worth eating — the way I was trained in Europe, where the clean-label bar is simply higher and better for humans to eat.
Kitchen to Production
Turning a working recipe into a documented, repeatable spec a facility can actually run.
Co-Manufacturing & Margins
Whether you're designing to a production line you've already built or still figuring out how you'll make it at all, I design to your margin goals.
Line Renovation
A glow-up for an existing collection: new flavor, format, and presentation sizzle, without losing what customers already love.
The recipe isn't working.
Perfect in the kitchen, and wrong everywhere else — texture, stability, shelf life, or it just won't behave once you make more than a batch.
The collection needs some sizzle.
You want a product that makes people stop — designed to genuinely 'wow', and still costed to make sense.
It's time to scale.
The recipe has to become a documented spec a real facility can run — commercialized without losing what people loved about it.
You need to round out the collection.
A new product to open a new demographic or fill a gap in the line — designed on purpose, not by guesswork.
Respecting your brand, your margin, and your production setup is baked into the design from the start — not bolted on at the end. And if the brief and the numbers ever collide, I'll show you precisely where and why — then we map the fix.
Why it matters
In the food business, your margin is your lifeblood — it's the whole operation behind it: the equipment, the shifts, the people on the line, the cleanup between runs. I design your product to fit your production reality, so what wins on the bench still works on the floor.
What makes it different
Most product design starts with the recipe, then backs into whether it can be made. I start at the other end — from how you'll actually make it, what margin you need, and the end use — and design to those specs. Some call that discipline; for me it's just respect for the craft — I love this work too much to hand you a gorgeous product you can't actually make.
"MMELO dazzles with incredible confections."
"Beautiful, whimsical, confectionery evangelism."
"Milk Chocolate Michelangelos."
"Please Eat the Art."
Brands and institutions I've designed product for.
I've spent almost thirty-eight years building things, most of it without a map.
These days the thing I build is food: I'm a food product designer — a confectioner and chocolatier by training, and a problem-solver by disposition. It took a few unplanned turns to get here.
Before food, there was commercial production — the better part of two decades making commercials for brands like AT&T, music videos for artists like Busta Rhymes, and televised music events for Showtime. It taught me to move fast, stay calm, and watch the line items — all while everything around me was on fire. Then a natural hair care company, built from nothing, which taught me exactly what "from nothing" costs. Somewhere in there, I had a son in Barcelona and — while he was in nursery school — got the wild idea to start studying culinary science. Hooked.
All of it culminated in Mmelo Boutique Confections — my first real chapter in food, and the one that finally turned the detour into a career I love. It earned me Ohio's SBA Business Person of the Year in 2022.
None of those chapters were tidy. I didn't get all of them right — a few of them I got spectacularly wrong. But together they taught me how to design a product to spec, and it starts with one unglamorous question: what is this thing actually for? Not what's trendy, not what's hot this quarter — what has to work, for this brand, in this facility, in the hands of the person who'll actually use it. Get that right, and it works — repeatably, sustainably, batch after batch, in service of the brand's goals. Get it wrong, and someone's setting their hair on fire six months later, fixing what should've been solved on the drawing board — the kind of mistake a big brand can absorb and a small one can't survive. I'd rather solve it there.
of the Year 2022
Before You Call a Co-Man
The map nobody hands you — the three MOQs nobody separates, why “the quote” isn’t the price, and the six questions that change the conversation. The short guide I wish someone had slid across the table before my first co-manufacturer call.
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Co-Man Ready
Choosing a co-manufacturer is the biggest, hardest-to-undo decision an early food brand makes. This is the kit: the full guide, a weighted vetting scorecard, a cost-comparison worksheet that normalizes quotes to cost per sellable unit, and the plant-visit question set.
One payment. Four files. Yours forever.
Let's talk about
your product.
Let's discuss your challenges and see if I can help.