Lindsey Kirchner

For more than a decade, Lindsey Kirchner has built an exciting career testing, enhancing, and developing delicious flavors for myriad food and beverage products. Specializing in spice and herb extraction, she has found success as a senior scientist at Kalsec Inc., a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based supplier of natural herbs, spices, vegetables, and hops for the food industry, since 2010. As part of her duties, she is responsible for flavor matching, specific flavor profiling, and manufacturing aroma solutions based on customer or internal company requests. She will often utilize her creativity by working with customers asking for specific flavors that are not available and then developing them based on their flavor targets. She also conducts sensory tests on food, raw materials, beer, and other beverages.

Upon graduating from Western Michigan University with a Bachelor of Science in biomedical sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in criminal justice and corrections in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Ms. Kirchner entered the work world without a plan. However, she did live close to Kalsec and was initially hired into the company’s paprika breeding program before transitioning into the sensory testing department. Through her work in sensory testing, her curiosity pushed her toward learning more about product development and creating flavors. As her curiosity and creativity grew, she gravitated toward her current role. Among her proudest professional achievements is when she successfully helped a customer by developing a batch of flavors for cannabis-infused beverages in Canada. Following numerous product development cycles with the customers, Ms. Kirchner produced flavors that resulted in the client’s beverage being ranked among the top two or three highest-rated flavors in the market once it was released.

Looking toward the future, Ms. Kirchner is passionate about becoming a fully-certified flavorist and utilizing her skills to enhance the beverage industry, whether beer or other beer-related drinks. Furthermore, she wants to embrace more sustainable practices, expand the company’s product offerings using more creative flavor matches, and create “new and exciting things for food and beverage.” She attributes her success in the field to the numerous teams and departments she has been part of, and the general close-knit collaboration of the company.

Dedicated to what she does, Ms. Kirchner has been actively involved in such groups as the American Chemical Society, American Society of Brewing Chemists, and Society of Flavor Chemists—in which she serves as an apprentice flavorist.