Aug 8 2011 --- Westhove flours have been offering clean label solutions for 30 years, helping the agrifood industry to achieve natural products by developing a unique way to obtain authentic and functional ingredients.

Dr Walter Lopez, nutritionist at Limagrain Céréales Ingrédients (LCI) explains: “Our westhove range uses specially-selected cereal varieties in conjunction with our Farigel patented hydrothermal treatment to produce functional flours with efficient properties in prepared foods, sauces and soups. These properties include texturing, industrial stress resistance, additive replacement, and fat reduction.

Dr Lopez details key areas where westhove functional flours help agrifood companies to achieve these objectives:
Because they are flours, all our westhove ingredients produce home-made and additive-free textures with a touch of authenticity to make products stand out from the crowd. Sauces no longer have that artificial shine produced by additives, and are more opaque and more natural.

Our functional flours have a reassuring declaration as ‘wheat’, ‘corn’ or ‘rice’ flour - simple ingredients familiar to everyone. Modified starches may be replaced whilst retaining the resistance to freezing and/or heat treatments and shear.

Westhove functional flours resist freeze/thaw cycles with no retrogradation and no syneresis (westhove wheat 1000R, wheat Wi, rice 1000R and corn 1000G).  The result is that sauces remain identical despite the transition to -20°C.

Our ‘waxy’ functional flour can replace a proportion of added fats, while keeping their organoleptic benefits, such as melt-in-the-mouth texture and smoothness in the mouth. For example, incorporating just 1% of wheat 1000R into an emulsified sauce can replace up to 6% of the cream, while offering identical gustatory benefits, giving a better nutritional profile and lower formulation costs!

Some of our functional flours give resistance to heat treatments and shear (wheat 600, wheat L3, wheat L3D) and can help to maintain texture after UHT treatment, sterilisation or pasteurisation, or when subjected to high levels of shear.

Our instantaneous functional flours (westhove wheat 1500i, wheat 7418, wheat Wi, corn 1000i) ensure the suspension of solid chunks prior to cooking and can eliminate a cooking stage in the process.

“We know that consumers want a return to familiar ingredients and in recent years, terms such as ‘natural’, ‘authentic’, ‘preservative-free’ and ‘additive-free’ have proliferated on the packaging of food products in Europe. These clearly portray the consumer’s desire to return to simple, less-processed ingredients which are familiar to everyone, and the rejection of additives. For agrifood companies, claiming 100% natural products and crusading against additives leads to success on the European market and gives companies a powerful differentiation strategy,” adds Dr Lopez.