Herbal Beverage Stability R&D

I’m in the very first stretch of formulating a new herbal drink and need an R&D-minded food scientist to help me get the fundamentals right. The focus is three-fold—pH stabilization, an effective yet clean-label preservation system, and an evidence-based plan for shelf-life extension—but the immediate priority is to map and understand the pH behaviour of the base infusion.

Here’s what I’m after right now:

• A concise literature scan on similar herbal beverages, highlighting how buffering agents, acids, or botanical actives typically shift pH over time.
• A step-by-step experimental design (bench-scale) that lets us profile my formula’s pH drift, titratable acidity, and microbial risk points.
• Recommendations for natural or reduced-synthetic preservatives that will pair well with the flavour profile while meeting common regulatory limits.
• A roadmap for future shelf-life testing—outline of accelerated vs. real-time studies, sample size, and key analytical methods (e.g., HPLC for actives, challenge testing for pathogens).

Deliverables can take the form of a short technical memo plus annotated spreadsheets or lab protocols; I don’t need a full regulatory dossier yet, just clear, actionable next steps I can execute in a test kitchen or small pilot facility.

If you’re comfortable discussing buffers, water activity, and preservative kinetics—and you enjoy turning early research questions into practical experiments—I’d love to collaborate.