BY HÉLÈNE SIMONIN DIRECTOR FOOD, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH, EUROPEAN DAIRY ASSOCIATION
For this year’s Word Dairy Innovation Awards I will be looking with pleasure at the fascinating list of products nominated – these are living examples of trends in the dairy world. And trends there are many!
The challenge for companies is to sense or interpret some regional or global trends and then go all the way to implement them in one or several concrete product launches. It is only when a new product is ready that we see how easy it finds its new place; perhaps we could even say it should look effortless, like falling in to its natural place on the market?
Another criterion for an innovation award will always be the creativity and “newness” of a product. Of course there may be some products where such newness may also be a new way of linking back to the roots. The wider question would thus be how to bridge innovation with consistency of a company or brand. We can imagine that some consumers want to get deeper into an understanding of the product, while others may just ask for the pleasure of change.
From a policy perspective, some of the wider trends are the idea of getting to a more circular economy, managing to balance both healthy and sustainable approaches, respecting and enlivening the environment, the economical and human aspects altogether. These criteria are of course important for the overall diet and lifestyle of a consumer and the global strategy of a company, but some new products might well see how they can best fit into this broader picture. Especially in the year of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, that perspective may be on more than one mind.
This will be for me the third year of judging for the World Dairy Innovation Awards – and this time again I am looking forward to a refreshing look into creative mindsets and opportunities in the dairy world! If we now wanted to hashtag the innovation potential of these products, what about #newlyness and #dairyvalue?
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