The trade off between health and taste

Oxford NutraScience Group Plc develops and commercialises enhanced medicine and supplement delivery systems using our proprietary formulation and drug delivery technologies. Our systems are designed to deliver superior taste and mouth feel, to be convenient to take and administer and to be simple to manufacture. In this editorial we explore how to take the learnings from innovative medicine development and apply them to the issues facing the food industry.

Healthy products don't have to taste bad but too often that is the consequence of the trade off that most people live with and have therefore put up with  For ages popular sayings have backed up this view; "There's no gain without pain"... "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down", on diet programs tasty foods are referred to as "sins" It's no wonder that in a busy modern lifestyle with pressures from work and home life that many people indulge in treat eating as a way to keep going and are prepared to put up with the consequences of a sugar rush, we all do it !!

At Oxford Nutrascience we are well aware of the trade off that is needed 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 and with ever increasing demands for consumer choice in healthcare products and a focus on preventing illness rather than just treating conditions when you get them consumers, are demanding different formats that make taking medicines easier and in

some cases less disgusting.  Our delivery systems are designed to improve taste, mouth feel and solubility of medicines and supplements and we incorporate these to develop innovative products for generic medicines and everyday ingredients that have been hitherto hard to formulate in this way.

Our current formats include liquid suspensions, chewable tablets and soft confectionery chews with applications in medicine, supplement and functional food ingredient delivery. Our formats are ideal for the elderly or children who often have trouble with solid formats such as tablets, pills or capsules. We also have novel taste masking technology to mask bitter medicines and have developed the first totally taste masked ibuprofen that we can add to chewable tablets and suspensions therefore making adult doses of this NSAID much more convenient and palatable.

As well as medicines, we have used our expertise to develop healthier confectionery that still tastes great. It is widely appreciated that a lot of the great taste in sweets and snacks comes from manufacturers adding sugars, fats or salt to improve taste and when consumers demand more healthier versions of products the solution of manufacturers is to simply remove these ingredients and replace with artificial versions, eg sweeteners instead of sugars and the overriding reaction of consumers is Yuck!! What happened to my sweet?

Too often, solutions like sugar free mean taste free and despite consumer demand for healthier products they reject them because they don't taste as nice and slowly revert back to their traditional unhealthy 'bad for you' snacks and treats.

We don't buy that theory. Our solution is different. As a medicines developer we cannot compromise on quality so we don't just take things out we find solutions that allow consumers to get great tasting products that are better for them.

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 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 license 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 at all. As a result, our unique fortified chew is reduced in sugar, high in fibre yet with the same soft texture as traditional chews.

Our passion helps us to provide novel solutions to making medicines and supplements easier to take, not just to add ingredients or take out the nasty stuff. We use science to bring innovation to generic medicine API's which tend to get little or no development attention because of the competition from generics houses driving down the value of the category. We develop dossiers for pharma companies to license for their own brands; in effect we are an outsourced development house for medicines and supplements and are always looking for new solutions to problematic formulations and patient needs that we have identified

To find out more about us and our capabilities and product dossiers please contact Nigel Theobald via phone on +44 1332 690061 or email n.theobald@nutrascience.co.uk