A selection of client engagements across product development, crisis diagnostics, process engineering, and litigation — spanning the full breadth of Dr. Quintanar's consulting practice.
A snack manufacturer was experiencing abnormally high peroxide index values in frying oil before the product even entered the fryer — indicating oxidation was occurring during heat-up, not during frying itself.
A tortilla chip manufacturer needed to correct two interconnected product defects: a completely flat chip with no bubble formation, and an excessively hard texture that made the product commercially unacceptable.
A manufacturer targeting the premium snack segment needed to develop a line of tortilla chip variants with elevated nutritional profiles for a health-conscious, gourmet market — while fully preserving the authentic tortilla chip eating experience.
A client required a nixtamalization process capable of retaining sufficient pericarp (corn bran) to support a regulatory dietary fiber claim of at least 8 grams per 28g serving, without negatively impacting flavor or texture.
A manufacturer of direct-expansion extruded snacks was producing a critically under-expanded product — dense, heavy, and commercially unacceptable relative to the expected light, puffed profile.
A snack manufacturer was receiving customer complaints of quality failure within two weeks of purchase — nearly 10× faster than the expected 12-week shelf life. The root cause was the packaging material, not the product.
A small snack producer's product development was stalled and commercially underperforming. The root cause was not a formulation problem — launch decisions were being made unilaterally by the company owner, bypassing the team and any objective consumer data.
Across Dr. Quintanar's career, process control specifications at manufacturing facilities are routinely found to be significantly out of date — sometimes by decades — with no one able to explain their origin or most recent validation.
Dr. Quintanar was retained as the sole expert witness defending a small snack manufacturer against a patent infringement suit filed by a major global snack company, which alleged the smaller firm had copied proprietary forming equipment.
Over nearly 18 years as a research professor studying nixtamalization, Dr. Quintanar built the academic foundation that led to a five-year applied R&D program to fundamentally re-engineer the water consumption and wastewater generation of industrial corn nixtamalization.
