Nestlé Dreyer’s Ice Cream has announced “key ingredient improvements” to six of its American ice cream brands, including Häagen-Dazs, Skinny Cow and Dreyer’s.
The move is the latest milestone in Nestlé’s effort to update existing products across the entire portfolio of brands in order to give consumers greater choice, and satisfy changing preferences within the ice cream category. The changes will focus on simplifying ingredient lists while maintaining taste, and include the removal of artificial colours and flavours, high-fructose corn syrup and genetically modified ingredients.
Nestlé has also commmited to using fresh milk from cows not treated with the bovine growth hormone rBST, and eggs from chickens not kept in cages. The company will also add more real fruit or fruit juice to its products while reducing the amount of sugar by an average of 11% across select product lines.
The newly updated products began rolling out nationally last month.
Robert Kilmer, president of Nestlé Dreyer’s Ice Cream, said: “Nestlé Dreyer’s Ice Cream understands that consumers want to know what’s in their food, where those ingredients come from and how the food products they purchase are made. We are the industry leader when it comes to innovation and, as consumer demand centers on transparency and choice, we are responding with new ways to make ice cream even better. Using simpler ingredients that our consumers can recognise, and removing those that don’t belong, is a natural next step for our brands.”
A prominent example of Nestlé’s reformulations is the Edy’s Slow Churned brand, which, after launching as a reduced-fat and lower-in-calorie ice cream in 2004, is now introducing new Slow Churned Simple Recipes branding across nine of its most popular flavours to reflect the use of simple ingredients. The improved recipes feature a label with seven or eight ingredients, reduced from an average of 22. It has removed ingredients such as carrageenan and xanthan gum, replacing them with alternatives such as pectin, as a means of achieving the simplification.
Michael Sharp, who led the reformulation of the Edy’s Slow Churned brand, said: “Our mission is to deliver the best product for the consumer. In the case of Simple Recipes, this meant maintaining the great taste and texture of an established and well-liked product with simpler ingredients that consumers understand.”
Nestlé plans to update the remaining Slow Churned flavors by the end of 2017 and will continue to update other products across all brands in its portfolio.
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