Innovation in food flavors, colors, and fragrances: Key highlights from our webinar
Clean labeling, vegan and gluten-free options, natural processing, and hidden vegetables: today’s consumers demand more from their food than ever. To remain competitive, it’s essential for food companies to tap into the latest flavor, color, and fragrance trends in their products. And material characterization can play a big role in helping them do this!
Our recent webinar to celebrate World Food Day dived into these innovations further – part of our series on advanced technologies in food and dairy. Here’s a recap of what we discussed:
Key takeaways
- Food formulators face continuous pressure from the market, price fluctuations, and consumer expectations – particularly when it comes to taste and stability.
- While each region has its own preferences, products sold across regions must be of consistent quality every time.
- AI and the ‘digital revolution’ are paving the way for improved consistency and efficiency in food innovation.
People have become scared of formulated products, but a formulated product is not a ‘bad’ product. So much of the food we eat has been formulated by a team of scientists to be the way we like it. Food formulators are the unsung heroes of the food industry!
Meeting evolving market needs
Steve Ward-Smith, our Strategic Account Manager, kicked off the webinar by highlighting how changing consumer preferences are shaping product development. There is a growing interest in vegan and plant-based options, for instance, but these formulations come with their unique challenges. Plant proteins don’t behave like animal proteins, leading to complexities in achieving the desired mouthfeel and stability.
To address these challenges, food companies must constantly reformulate their products, ensuring they maintain flavor and texture while adapting to ingredient availability issues, such as the recent spike in cocoa butter prices.
Regional tastes, global quality
As well as ingredient availability, tastes also vary around the world – and Steve highlighted that these tastes do not change quickly! In China, for instance, most consumers have little interest in chocolate, and coffee is only gradually increasing in popularity. This means that launching new products is a big risk: it’s even more important than usual for food formulators to deliver on flavor, fragrance, and stability.
At the same time, when food producers do provide the same product to multiple regional markets, they need to make sure quality is consistent across them all. Malvern Panalytical can support this with solutions such as its Smart Manager software. By allowing formulators to monitor their analytical instruments remotely, Smart Manager can help ensure consistent food quality across the world.
Food producers need to make sure their products taste and behave the same way all over
the world, and we want to help them do this. For instance, we’re looking at expanding our
Smart Manager support for the Mastersizer 3000+, so that manufacturers have an easy way
of checking on the performance of their fleet of Mastersizers around the world.
The future of food innovation is digital…
Indeed, artificial intelligence and smart technology will be able to enhance food monitoring
processes even further in the years to come – ultimately leading to better consistency in
flavor and texture. We’ll explore this further in the last webinar of this series, so stay tuned!
Curious? You can watch the webinar recording here – and why not register for one of the
remaining ones in the series?