BY ALEX CLERE IN FRANKFURT, GERMANY
Food Ingredients Europe (FiE) has kicked off here in Frankfurt – perhaps the most significant show for the European ingredients sector and back again after its regular biennial hiatus.
Throughout this week we’ll bring you our key insights into the show, with the usual suspects like clean-label and sugar of course, but one of the most promising areas was that of senior nutrition.
Earlier, FoodBev spoke with Inge Lise Povlsen, senior category and application manager for Arla Foods Ingredients, about how it was enabling consumers to “change your body age”.
As well as a whey-based ‘complementary feeding’ concept that aims to bridge the gap between a young child consuming milk to eating solid food, Arla has developed a pre-meal protein shot with whey protein and fibre that can help the world’s 400 million consumers with type-1 or type-2 diabetes (as well as an extra 300 million people who are estimated to be at risk of diabetes) to regulate their blood sugar levels.
As the world’s population spirals out of control, the need for effective senior nutrition products is growing. That was one of the points made by Maarten van Beek, global general manager of marketing and sales for NZMP’s Medical Nutrition division.
The newly created team, from the ingredients arm of dairy giant Fonterra, has been specifically set up to capitalise on opportunity in the targeted nutrition space.
As van Beek’s colleague – global innovation and technical lead Stephen Gregory – told me, Japan is really the model for products of this kind as consumers there have a higher life expectancy than in any other country.
Fonterra is throwing its considerable weight behind the new venture, flying a handful of staff – including Gregory – out from New Zealand to be part of the project.
But NZMP Medical Nutrition is not constrained to dairy ingredients and is capable of thinking creatively and differently about the world’s nutrition needs, both he and van Beek are keen to point out.
They have heard from potential customers in Japan who want benefits on eyesight, from South Korea where there is demand for products that help alleviate the symptoms of cancer, and more generally around diabetes and obesity.
As Stephen Gregory explains, their work is mostly to do with providing ingredients that enhance the health of ‘well’ consumers with products that they would normally consume – and that are more fun to consume than purely medicinal products, like cheesecake for example – than targeting specific ailments.
Martin van Beek is not afraid to admit that NZMP Medical Nutrition is ‘a little bit crazy’. He hopes that the next year will allow the unit to develop a clear innovation pipeline, working with academic and medical institutions to identify new consumer needs and conceive effective solutions to them.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024