How Do Food Businesses Develop New Flavors and Products? Behind the Scenes with an R&D Pastry Chef from Eli’s Cheesecake

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When a huge fast food company like Taco Bell decides they need to provide their customers with the opportunity to gorge on Baja Blast Gelato, the recipe needs to be a lot more complex than just “one medium Mountain Dew + one scoop ice cream.” That’s where the R&D chef comes in. Their job is to take trends and translate them into menu items that can be replicated and served consistently, and at a reasonable cost to price ratio. The same is true for local dessert stalwart Eli’s Cheesecake, whose high-volume production of their “Chicago-style cheesecakes” starts with ideas from the team at the bakery.

Elissa Narow has been creating desserts for Chicago’s restaurants since the late ’90s. Her technical skill and passion for seasonality combined with graceful artistry and a delicate hand landed her in cutting-edge, history-making restaurants like Trio, Blackbird, and Spring.

“Working at Trio really solidified that career path for me,” she says. “It wasn’t so much about local and sustainable at that time; it was high quality ingredients from anywhere.”

But after years of working in pastry kitchens, she “wanted to transition out of restaurants. I wanted to see something else in the food world.” So she tried a different tack: consulting on a donut shop opening in Glenview.

It was in the donut world that Narow began to learn the skills needed to replicate and reproduce a single item at scale rather than a single plate. “There’s a different kind of creativity in coming up with one donut,” she adds. “You gotta get everything into that one item.”

She joined Eli’s Cheesecake’s innovation department in 2022 as a research and development chef. “I got hired, basically, because I came out of the food industry, and they wanted a creative person in the mix, just to kind of move forward with new ideas and different creative approaches.”

At Eli’s, she works with a team of three other chefs in a small industrial kitchen adjacent to the cafe and the giant production kitchen where all the baking is done for food service and retail. “I'm basically doing the same thing I always did: I'm cooking,” she explains. She uses a regular stand mixer and usually makes only a single batch at a time. “You also have to be thinking about, ‘Okay, I’m doing this in this little tiny mixer...But how can this be made in a production scenario where you're making millions of them?’ It gets a little tricky.”

Fortunately, Narow works with a team that has 49 years of experience. She describes her job as “project-driven,” so whether she is working on a new flavor profile for a cheesecake or a new item that the company hasn’t produced before, the first step is to brainstorm with the team. “There’s a wealth of recipe development and testing that’s already been done,” says Narow, so the team communicates about how to proceed. They also loop in the sales, marketing, and production teams to help with ingredient procurement and costs, logistics, and trends.

The marketing team officially reports on trends, but there is also lots of informal communication and collaboration on recipe ideas. Any time a new bakery or pastry shop opens, someone from Eli’s pays a visit to bring back some samples for the team to taste together and find inspiration – just like when Narow worked in restaurants. Same goes for social media. “We are all constantly looking at things and saying ‘Oh, that’s really cool, how can I do that here?’”

The first cheesecake Narow developed at Eli’s launched at the National Restaurant Show in May of 2024. The marketing team identified s’mores in a trend report, and Narow took on the project and spent four months translating those nostalgic flavors into a replicable (known in the industry as “scalable”), cost-effective, and delicious product.

“I came at it from the perspective of a pastry chef who came from the restaurant world…of plated desserts…instead of having it just be like a chocolate cheesecake with marshmallow fluff,” she explains. “I wanted to make a graham cracker cheesecake, because in restaurants, I’ve made a graham [cracker] ice cream. So I have a salty graham crust. A graham cheesecake, with chocolate chips folded into it for the texture, a smoky chocolate ganache, and then a marshmallow fluff that we torch.”

Narow has also developed other flavors/products with her team such as a cannoli cheesecake in collaboration with J. P. Graziano Grocery last summer for National Cheesecake Day – a ricotta cheesecake with a cannoli graham crust, candied orange, chocolate chips, topped with mascarpone mousse and amarena cherries.

Along with having to learn to finally be a morning person (restaurant shifts always went late into the night), as in any creative job, Narow faces limits. Although Eli’s uses high quality ingredients, production baking calls for much more attention to cost than her unrestricted fine dining budgets, and scalability comes into play in every scenario. Narow is also enjoying learning more about food science to pair with her artistry.

Ultimately, she has found fundamental similarities between being a pastry chef for a top restaurant and being an R&D chef for a top baking company. “On some level, you're cooking for the same person – your customer is the same, essentially. And your goals are definitely the same – to make something really delicious and fun.”