For manufacturers, the pressure to switch over to natural ingredients and cleaner labels is unavoidable. Yet understanding which clean-label claims are important to consumers and what motivates purchase has been one of the industry’s biggest grappling points in the past few years.
At Food Ingredients Europe, Alex Clere spoke with Nanette Solan – a senior insight manager for Kerry – as well as marketing director Sue Lamon-Diver about the company’s efforts in understanding consumers’ clean-label desires.
Tell us about how you’ve been researching what consumers want from clean-label foods.
Nanette Solan: Just before the summer, around April, we started a bespoke piece of consumer research where we tried to understand what really matters for consumers in terms of clean label, because ultimately it’s very easy for us to talk about our technical capabilities but if we don’t find a way to make it matter to consumers it’s not going to deliver. This piece of research threw up a couple of interesting things: first of all about half of consumers are familiar with the term ‘clean label’ and only half of those actually claim that they understand what it means. So clean is not a consumer term; it’s an industry term and we just need to make sure that whenever any of the food and beverage companies talk to consumers that we don’t use our jargon, because that’s not what matters to them. What the work also showed was that part of the origin of clean label comes from the fact that consumers are confused about how food is now being made, what’s in it and what it does for them. So there’s a lot of information online – some of it contradictory, some of it incorrect, some of it provided by people who ultimately don’t have the technical expertise that you might need, and in some cases people are being paid for it. This is about what ingredients are good and bad for you, whether gluten-free is healthy or whether it’s actually being undone by all of the things that are being added to it, but also a lot of information about food scares and food contamination that gets a lot of press. This has caused a situation where consumers are confused, they’re no longer as connected to the food that they’re consuming as they used to be, and trust is eroding. The way for consumers to get that trust back is through cleaner interpretations of foods that already exist so that they can understand the ingredients that go into their food; the sourcing – where it came from; processing – what was done to it; and ultimately the taste – it still needs to taste really good because otherwise it’s so much harder to make the right decisions.
Sue Lamon-Diver: That’s actually a really great point because when you ask them [consumers] about it, they come back under a number of key themes: they want food to be sustainable, they want it to be traceable, they want it to be better for them. All of those words can mean clean label. It’s about bringing offerings to the market that tick all of those boxes.
NS: What we’ve done off the back of that research, we now have a framework through which we think about clean-label solutions, which we call the ‘5 Rs’: replace, reduce, remove, reinvent and reposition. What this allows us to do is either we can replace, reduce or remove ingredients, which will allow our customers to either reposition a product within this category or really reinvent a category altogether. For example, in carbonated soft drinks, using botanical extracts allows us not only to have soft drinks with much less sugar than the standard ones, but also really interesting flavours that we haven’t really seen to date. In ‘reposition’, we can remove artificial flavours, artificial colours and replace them with the natural versions so that all of a sudden a product can start operating in the better-for-you category whereas before it may just have been indulgent and now all of a sudden it can be both at the same time.
Do you have any examples of where you’ve been able to replace artificial ingredients for natural ones?
NS: We’ve done it in the snacking industry. In terms of the botanicals, that’s very much in the soft drinks industry. Reducing sugar – carbonated soft drinks, but also things like tomato sauce. Ultimately, people don’t expect sugar to be in their tomato sauce so it’s important that we help our customers reduce that.
SL-D: Prepared meals is a big push, particularly around that whole authentic taste and bringing back real bone stock to prepared meals and soups and sauces, so that has been a big ask for our customers over the past couple of months particularly.
NS: Whenever you reduce either sugar, salt, fat, you can’t just take something out and not do anything to substitute it because ultimately you’re affecting the taste, you’re affecting the shelf-life, you’re affecting the performance and the texture, so it is about reducing sugar and then making sure that the product still performs in exactly the same way with the only difference being the sugar reduction.
SL-D: You have to look as the product as a whole, so when you take something out what happens to the product then? So you put something back in again. But you don’t want to put it back in and make the label less clean than it was, you want it to be more clean, so we try and start everything with our ‘from food, for food’ ethos – so if it’s going to be a soup stock, starting back with the bone and making stock like you would in your kitchen at home.
NS: Another example would be around ‘remove’ – so we are aiming to remove e-numbers where possible, but ultimately that does impact on shelf-life, so we can then use a very well-known process like fermentation to actually maintain the shelf-life but still be able to reduce the e-numbers as well. And fermentation is something that most consumers are familiar with from bakery and brewery, so they’re not uncomfortable with the process, so that allows us to put a healthier product in front of consumers without having to add a particular ingredient to it.
Is there anything that’s been thrown up by this research that’s surprised you?
SL-D: There was a percentage of people that were prepared to pay more for a product that has a clean-label statement behind it, and it was quite a high percentage.
NS: In the US it was 75%, in Europe it was a little lower but still over 50%. We also see it if you look at the snacking industry – indulgent categories – we see that people are willing to pay more for a pack of crisps, a more premium pack of crisps, at the same time they’re reducing their consumption. They’re probably still spending the same amount of money over a two or three-month period, but they’re willing to spend their money on less of the product but of a higher quality. We definitely do see that there’s willingness to invest in a good experience and to swap habits.
Clean-label highlights
So if consumers are paying more for something they eat less of, apart obviously from the reputational benefits, what incentive is there for manufacturers to switch over to clean-label foods?
NS: Well if the demand for more premium, healthier, cleaner products is increasing, we need to make sure we’re part of that game.
SL-D: If you look at the artisanal producers at the moment, they’re winning over the big brands. They’re able to make stuff at much smaller scale and the trick for the big brands is they want part of that action, so how do they take that premium, more clean-label, more high-end product into a much more scalable size. That’s where the opportunity lies if you take the big brands, they’re taking stuff that’s at a small level – from artisanal to scalable – is where there is a big opportunity for many of our customers and we work luckily with small, medium and big companies. You can see the opportunities for the small guys – they’re taking them very, very easily because they’re much more agile – and the challenge for the big guys is being able to replicate that at scale, and I think that’s something particularly at Kerry that we can help you do.
NS: A lot of the artisanal brands, they talk very emotionally and very involved about their product. They still have that founder’s mentality of ‘I love my product, please let me explain why you should love my product’. And it works. Those brands talk about things that matter to consumers and larger players need to adopt a similar approach.
And is that not more difficult for bigger companies to do?
NS: It will be more difficult, definitely not impossible. At the same time bigger brands will have some capabilities that the smaller guys won’t have. It’s about balancing out this emotional aspect with the scale and the experience. Now, larger players will have more complex environments in terms of having to operate across multiple countries or multiple categories and because not all categories have similar connotations when it comes to ‘clean’ and not all countries look at clean-label in the same way, that adds an extra layer of complexity. So they have to approach it slightly differently, and they have to be aware of the differences and tailor how they communicate to consumers accordingly. But I think both have their strengths.
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