The magic ingredient

What are the most challenging issues facing the ingredients sector at the moment? And how is your organisation attempting to confront - and overcome -these challenges?

Michael Coopman. OMVE is a leading technology company specialised in high quality small-scale liquid food processing equipment for laboratory and pilot departments. Our main objective is to support food processing companies to choose the best possible investments regarding small scale innovative technologies and high quality equipment from the complete range of technologies available to achieve trials in less time, saving on labour and ingredient and delivering highest performance and reliable test results that can be quickly and accurately reproduced and scaled to production size.

We are aware that the food sector is going through an interesting and exciting time. New markets are driven by the growth of innovative brands and private labels, an interest in healthy food and the awareness in sustainability. Among our main customers, leading food ingredient companies will not hesitate to invest in innovation, food quality and clients services.

Our services and equipments speed-up reproducible/reliable processes and production of a small amount of product to undergo required trials without interfering with daily production scheduling, equipment certification, etc. Many different products and processes can be simulated in a day, thereby lowering costs.

Our challenge and our driving force is to optimise our equipment to enable our clients in the ingredient sector to attain their specific objectives. This you can only achieve when you fully focus on your customers' requirements and needs. Our goal is to find the best solution for each one of our customers.

Nigel Theobald. By far the most talked about issue for food ingredients is the EFSA health claims process and their overwhelming rejection of most health claims. For years the food ingredient industry has been making more and more health claims, trying to behave like pharmaceutical companies but without the back up of full clinical evidence. Sure, some studies provide the necessary support but the overwhelming majority do not.

I feel too much emphasis over the last few years has been placed on making claims for ingredients rather than focusing on delivering innovative products and formats that would get individuals to buy more products.

On one hand the industry appears to want to behave like the pharmaceutical industry by making health claims yet on the other it does not focus its development on product differentiation which is the key focus of consumer healthcare companies.

A molecule like ibuprofen now available generically with a strong evidence-based health claim has seen a host of innovative new products launched to allow brands to differentiate. If ingredient companies were working with ibuprofen they would focus more time and effort trying to prove ibuprofen cures this or that rather than coming up with new novel formats to tackle headaches.

Ingredient companies need to focus more on diversity of format as opposed to ingredient claim. At Oxford Nutrascience we devote all our energy to providing innovative delivery formats for medicines, supplements and food ingredients in a way that consumers actually want to try them.

Tomokazu Teshima. Not many food technologists would dispute the usefulness of MSG, but it has been subject to unjustified health concerns and is now often branded under the "No-MSG" campaign. 

As a company that supplies the key ingredient Monosodium Glutamate to the food industry, winning the correct understanding has always been an uphill battle for us due to the misconception on the nature of the product itself.

In ancient Rome, garum, a fermented fish sauce, was an essential and valuable condiment. Today, we enjoy Parmesan cheese sprinkled over our favourite Italian dishes. Of all the variety of cheeses, Parmesan cheese is known to have the highest content of glutamate. It is not simply because people liked the taste of garum, or Parmesan cheese, but because people appreciated something different and satisfying. This is what is now scientifically identified as UMAMI, and glutamte is one of the substances that expresses it.

Wilfried Brandl. There is growing demand for ready-made meals and convenience food preparations by the progressive industrialisation of additional parts of the world. This is accompanied by the demand for natural and healthy food caused by increased consciousness of consumers about the importance of healthy nutrition. Leiber is producing yeast products based on naturally fermented brewers yeast. We are serving the food industry with yeast extracts produced only by biological, enzymatic and physical processes. These products, apart from supplying diverse, savoury taste solutions, contribute to healthy nutrition by their natural constituents, as there are amino acids, vitamins and minerals.

With our health functional products InterYeast Vital (inactive brewers yeast) and Yestimun (yeast beta glucan) we offer prebiotic and vitamin-rich products supporting the human immune system.

The growth of demand has made us invest strongly in our production capacity accompanied by modernisation up to the latest technical quality level.                       

The ingredients market is a highly competitive one. In your quest to gain a larger market share, what are some of the new products that you believe will gain valuable cut through for your organisation?

NT. Meet the Chewyz, high fibre soft chews packed full of extra vitamins and omega3 but still as tasty as the brand leader. Kids love them because they taste great, it's a simple as that, and parents love them because they know these chews are healthier for their children so it's a win all round. Chewyz are the latest product to emerge from Oxford Nutrascience. As a technology company we use our systems to develop products and solutions for manufacturers and out licence the technology or provide finished products from our manufacturing partners.

We use a unique blend of non-digestible fibres to reduce the sugars and fat traditionally used to make soft chews and this provides for improved organoleptic properties. Our patented process allows for lower cooking temperature so we can add hard-to-work with ingredients such as omega3 yet with no fishy taste. As a result, our unique fortified chew is reduced in sugar, high in fibre yet with the same soft texture as traditional chews.

TT. The word, and the meaning of, Umami have just begun to gain full understanding from leading companies and chefs. We are now introducing the concept of Kokumi which describes a more intricate taste profile that can only be obtained  through cooking. Whilst Umami singles out one of the five basic tastes, Kokumi defines a much more complex taste profile that is expressed mainly by a combination of amino acids.

I expect that it will take time to gain similar recognition as Umami. We are trying to shed light on an area of taste that has been appreciated, but not recognised, as an essential field of taste.

WB. We at Leiber are specialists in products made from yeast. As a medium-sized company we concentrate our activities on these specialties and here we are serving every solution needed. We are expressively customer orientated and eager to find the best solution for our customers, wherever they are in the world.  Because of our raw material we are in a situation to offer a wider range of products compared to our competitors. So the customer can receive the solution from us and not necessarily has to approach several yeast extract producers. In German tradition, the utmost quality possible is our daily objective. Production in industrial size + highest quality + flexibility for us is not a contradiction but a challenge. One example is our Leiber-Viande A65, a dark yeast extract with meaty, beefy taste, highly concentrated but in liquid form. So the product is easy to handle, pumpable and available at a comparable low price. Another example is our Leiber-Bouillon G, LS, a light yeast extract with cooked meat bouillon taste, rich in natural amino acids so, for example, glutamic acid. And this is made of regular brewers yeast -Saccharomyces cerevisiae - with no GMO or untypical strains of yeast.                                                           

MC. OMVE approach, i.e. simulating an industrial process our clients are familiar with, is rapidly gaining users approval. Our customers appreciate the growing opportunities through a win-win partnership available with OMVE: 'Fit to purpose' as they say. The OMVE task force has always been stimulated and inspired by novel, latest innovation in process technologies that would give added value to the product, be more respectful of the environment and be of assistance for our customer cost saving concerns. In this field in 2011 OMVE will launch new non-thermal processing equipment achieving product safety and quality attributes preservation, extended shelf- life and keeping the product as natural and fresh as possible. Empowering the food ingredient sector to develop new products, to get access to larger markets and develop new opportunities.

What do you see as the emerging markets? How do you aim to crack these critical markets?

TT. Since the discovery of glutamate, Ajinomoto has expanded the range of amino acids it offers through its unique production technology. I believe that finding applications for individual amino acids in food can also make a significant difference.

The use of MSG is sometimes criticized as "masking the taste of poor ingredients". This is definitely untrue. The use of MSG restores the balance of amino acids which may have been lost through the industrial process and leads to higher satisfaction. Replacement of MSG by HVP, yeast extract, or even soy sauce powder is possible. However, this is simply replacing MSG with something that is rich in glutamate.

The existence of glutamate in food is nothing artificial, but a necessity. "Adding" is nowadays regarded to be somewhat negative, but "balancing" should give a totally new perspective.

WB. For Leiber the emerging markets are predominantly in Eastern Europe, like Poland, Ukraine and Russia and in Asia, like Thailand, Indonesia and China. In some respect for us also the USA is a market to be developed. The US is industrialised but the awareness for healthy daily food, for example the abandonment of artificial taste enhancers, is becoming more and more important for consumers' buying decisions. In the eastern and far eastern emerging market, most of these countries do have top class food industries, but our presence and education is most important to accelerate and increase the acceptance and use of our products. Our consultancy can contribute to the expertise of customers while creating opportunities for businesses. Not at least with various products we are in the position of price leadership, which is of even greater importance for emerging countries.

MC. We see a continuing growing interest in nutritionals, healthy ingredients, natural ingredients and less processed foods. These trends require different production processes, newly adapted systems and solutions to specific needs. In emerging markets such as the BRIC countries, quality requirements may still be lower than in the EU and USA, policy systems may not yet be implemented and the lowest cost is often the driving market force. Safety and quality are the best guarantees of success for the food sector. Ensuring the availability of such food is one of the best ways to promote good business while protecting and promoting better public health.

NT. Ingredients have had a lot of success in markets where they can easily be incorporated into existing formats e.g. probiotics in yoghurts, but there are many food categories where trying to develop healthier products becomes more complicated. Taste will be the biggest issue facing functional ingredients in the coming years.

At Oxford Nutrascience we are well aware of the trade off between something that is good for you and something that tastes great, after all this is our heartland. We specialise in making medicines easier to take. We place more emphasis on developing 'better for you' formats that taste great and meet the needs of food consumers rather than what the ingredient can do to improve your health, after all if consumers won't eat the product then they won't get the health benefit.

Let's do a little crystal ball gazing for a minute. What do you see as having the most potential for future growth?

WB. Supplying the growing population with food and the awareness of healthy nutrition, I think are the most important challenges for the food industry. So one important factor is to supply sufficient food to secure human nutrition and secondly to improve the healthiness of the ingredients. The world of food ingredients is very much diversified: products satisfying the nutritional value, additives with technological properties and ingredients, like our yeast extracts, supporting the indulgence and health. These solve these challenges, certainly by different and single solutions for every type of product, and the consideration of sustainability and human health seems to be a basis for future development of our industry and for the benefit of our customers, the consumers.

MC. OMVE is inspired by the idea that knowledge can be used to improve people's lives and the advanced processing equipment simulates industrial processes at the highest level, but raises the bar with the unconditional respect of safety and quality of the product. OMVE believes that sharing this information and knowledge in emerging markets contributes to people's good health and therefore is a fundamental resource for social and economic development.

This means there is a need for thinking outside the box. We are convinced that novel process technologies, like OMVE's Pulsed Electric Fields (PEF) and Cold Plasma Sterilisation, will play an important role in this.

NT. Those ingredients that have the best taste profile and most flexibility of being integrated into different formats will see the greatest future growth. The debate with EFSA will largely become irrelevant if consumers do not buy the products because they don't match up to their expectations. If they are being asked to switch their product choice from the high sugar, high fat version to one that is 'better for them' then it has to at least match the taste of their existing product otherwise it will be doomed to stay on the shelf.

TT. Lately, with the help of highly sophisticated computer technology and by modelling human taste bud particular to Umami taste, it has become possible to scan through thousands of chemicals with creative structure, and identify chemical structures that particularly impact the Umami taste bud. Of course, these will be subject to full safety evaluation, but I expect it will not be long before products containing such substances hit the shelves. This can be regarded as innovative, but must be reminded that they replace conventional ingredients with something that did not exist chemically in our traditional food.

Somewhat related, I am a little concerned that a new concept "Clean Label" has emerged. It may possibly appeal to the consumers. However, I start to worry when I hear people discussing "how to reduce the number of E-numbers on the ingredient lists" in this context. E-numbers have somehow been promoted to the consumers as something negative from the beginning. Preservatives, for example, are there to ensure that the food products on the shelves remain safe to eat. "No preservatives" may appeal to some consumers, but they are not prompted to ask, "then, how is it preserved?"

The intent of creating E-numbers was (and still is) meant to signal to consumers who are not familiar with chemical names or industrial ingredient names, that these were fully evaluated and endorsed for their safety. Creativity is always required, but such good intent to protect consumers and to benefit the food industry should not be twisted

THE PANEL

Michael Coopman has been active for more than 15 years in the processing industry in different countries and companies. He joined OMVE Netherlands BV in 2003 and since 2008 has been Sales Director/Co-Owner of OMVE Netherlands BV, a leading technology company specialised in high quality, small-scale liquid processing equipment.

Nigel Theobald is Chief Executive Officer, Oxford Nutrascience Group Plc
and has a background in marketing and product development in the OTC consumer healthcare market. Theobald worked for Boots for 15 years before setting up and selling his own distribution business in 2008 to set up ONG.

Dr. Wilfried Brandl is Business Unit Director Food at Leiber GmbH, Germany. He has studied food chemistry and done a PhD and research work at the universities of Hanover and Braunschweig, Germany. After 23 years research and development in the flavour and spices industry, today he is responsible for the food ingredient business at Leiber GmbH.

Tomokazu Teshima is President of Ajinomoto Foods Europe SAS. He joined Ajinomoto in 1980 and most of is previous career involved working with amino acids for the pharmaceutical industry, but also food ingredients and animal nutrition. He headed up the Sweeteners Department for two years before taking on the current assignment as President of Ajinomoto Foods Europe.