Behind the Label: How Glacial Treasure Products Are Developed and Tested

Every Glacial Treasure product on a grocery shelf started as a recipe conversation. Here’s an honest account of how we develop, test, and refine a product before it goes into production.

It Starts in the Family Kitchen

The Dikeos family has been cooking Greek and Mediterranean food for generations. Many of our most successful products — the souvlaki marinade, the kafta recipe, the shawarma seasoning blend — have roots in what Kostas and Anastasia Dikeos cooked at home in Greece and continued making in Canada. The homemade Tzatziki and Tirokafteri — still made from Anastasia’s original recipes and sold at our Cash & Carry and to food service clients — have never been changed. They don’t need to be.

The commercial product isn’t a departure from the home kitchen version. It’s a scaled and standardized version of the recipe that the family already knew worked. This isn’t true of most food manufacturers, who start with a target price point and engineer a product to hit it. We start with a recipe that tastes right and figure out how to produce it consistently.

From Kitchen to Production Floor

Taking a recipe that works in a five-kilogram test batch and making it work consistently in a production run of several hundred kilograms requires solving specific technical problems. Marinade penetration changes at scale. IQF behaviour is different in a full production run than in a home freezer. Spice ratios correct at small scale can become overwhelming at large scale. Betty, Alex, Georgia, and Bobby — the second generation of the Dikeos family — work through these variables on the production floor before a product is finalized. Five grandchildren are also part of that process now.

Testing Before It Leaves the Facility

Every production run at our HACCP-certified facility goes through documented quality control checks — temperature, weight, visual inspection, and cook testing where relevant. A product doesn’t leave 300 Milliken Blvd unless it meets our specification. That specification is the same whether it’s going to a grocery store, a restaurant, or a banquet hall.

The short version: we don’t ship something we wouldn’t eat ourselves. Three generations of the Dikeos family have operated on that principle. It’s not going to change.

Discover the full Glacial Treasure line— ddpoultry.ca/glacial-treasures/