The Editor Presents: Flavor Fusion Ready Meals
02 May 2024 | The World of Food Ingredients
Join The World of Food Ingredients’ editor, Missy Green, in a 15-minute roundup of themes from the ready meal edition.
Discover how small ingredients like yeast are making a big impact on savory flavor, as well as modern fermentation techniques to perfect the taste and nutrition of plant-based foods. Cooking at home has gotten more exciting as consumers aim to reign in spending with chef-inspired and fusion flavors.
We’ll also explore “an ocean of possibilities” with hydrocolloids from the sea and the FDA’s new Food Traceability Rule—FSMA 204. In other news, brands should beware of SARMs, unauthorized muscle-building supplement ingredients, which are appearing in online stores.
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Welcome to the world of Food ingredients Ready meals edition of The Editor Presents.
I'm your editor, Missy Green, and today we've got a great edition focused on how to make meals that are more delicious, healthier, and also cost-effective for consumers.
This is a live event, so if you have a question, you can send it over in the comments below.
You can also throw in some fun feedback, and I'll address it at the end of the session.
So, let's get to it.
In the food business news, the everything bagel flavor recently appeared in Cup Noodles.
This rendition was added to the brand's breakfast line, so, it's encouraging consumers to eat noodles any time of the day.
And this is an example of one of those blurring traditional meal times.
And next, We have an infographic from Manova Market Insights.
So, Europe is showing the most activity in Ready meals innovation with 43% share of launches, but Asia is not far behind with 34%.
Among the top launch flavors out there in the world, Asian flavors overall are showing strong growth.
One of the fastest growing is Japanese flavors with 30%.
That is, in the past 5 years, it's been growing by 30%, and also Korean flavors.
And at the foundation of any good meal is savory flavor.
This article explores ways to create umami with, different ingredients.
There's some interesting cross-cultural fusion examples too.
So, one is the use of a, a lighter Korean soy sauce and a vegan risotto, and the function of that is to replace the umami that you would get from the Parmesan cheese.
An article also looks into kokumi.
So, then it's about the mouthfeel.
That also makes food more delicious.
Next, we spoke in depth with US executive chef, Charlie Bags, about some of the culinary trends he's seen.
He has many, many years of culinary development.
And one of the things that he brought up is that authenticity is, you know, becoming more important, but it's also becoming more available with the globalization of the world.
So he's raised in Chicago.
And, you know, you said there was a time when tamarind was basically unavailable, but now you can get it in purees at an industrial level.
So it allows you to bring more authenticity in because you have the authentic ingredients, but there's also the need to often pair these with more familiar flavors when you're introducing them to the market.
So, a lot of really good culinary tips there.
And ready meal NPD, ready meals as a whole, sort of stayed stable, but it was interesting to see that there was, a decline in meal kits.
They had a negative 13% growth, whereas main dishes experience an 18% positive growth.
So there's been some sort of different shifts since the pandemic.
Of course, everyone had to change the way that they were eating during the pandemic and also during inflation.
And so, in lockdowns and in inflation, people started cooking from scratch more.
So, this could be, you know, a factor that's coming into play.
There's also so many of these meal subscription services that have come out and sort of stayed.
So, Interesting moves in the past 5 years in writing meals.
In, in our product spread, we, we focus on North American launches.
Interesting to see some snackification happening with the, the first one here, these mini chicken pot pie bites.
So, this is taking like something that would normally be a huge, like, savory comfort food meal and then putting them into these tiny little packets.
And, number 8 was also pretty interesting.
This is a truffle truffle Caesar salad.
So, it's creating this elevated restaurant fancy experience at home, and there's definitely been more of that as people are looking home too, looking to eat more at home, entertain more at home.
To save money, but still have a great time.
This article was all about fermentation and the amazing, amazing things that it's able to do.
And the premise of it started out by, seeing this paper about, it, it was a Nature paper written by someone from Harvard and , a university in France, and they have a theory that humans are only able to develop their huge brain because they could outsource a lot of this heavy work of fermenting foods from their gut into, you know, jars and containers.
And then I further speak with other companies who share how fermentation is really transformative, literally.
And making foods more digestible, but also removing anti-nutritional factors.
So, some of the, you know, biggest problems with plant-based flavor and also some of these, you know, nutritional things can be addressed through fermentation.
Next, we heard from Daphne Hapkin-Frinkel.
She's a seasoned vanilla expert and the organizer of the van of the vanilla conference.
She shares really valuable guidance on growing vanilla and why attempts to grow it in greenhouses so far have not reduced the world's reliance on just a handful of countries, so mostly Madagascar.
You know, it's very, something that takes a couple of years to grow, and then there's also all these price fluctuations.
So, when it's, it's going good, people invest in it, but then the prices drop, and, you have to invest a couple of years in it.
So it's been really tricky, and she also gives some very good advice about how to store vanilla, which is important because there's a surplus.
And a lot of it is going into storage.
So she really recommends not using vacuum sealing, and you can find out more about it in this article.
So, yeast is one of those tiny microorganism ingredients, making a huge impact when it comes to taste, also nutrition, also has a great sustainability, story.
It can be grown on side streams.
Yeast is also, contributing to a no additives, no preservatives label, right?
So, That was the main claim associated with yeast ingredients, and that was also the most important thing in ready meals in general, not having the additives and preservatives.
So, a really good opportunity for a clean label formulation, and there you can see some examples on the market today.
So, seaweed-based hydrocoloids, this is an interesting category.
We heard about it from our hydrocoloids expert, Nisha Zalesni, and seaweed-based hydrocoloids are so interesting because they're highly affordable and they're really abundant.
So, she explores.
Some of the unique properties that each type has really goes in depth to these like very fine differences that they have and the different applications you can use in ready meals.
And she also points out that carrageenan is a great ingredient, that's gotten a bad rap, and she feels, you know, unjustly, because there is actually just one source that, You know, that's it, it was dangerous in some way, but it has not been repeated.
So, she advocates still using it.
Next, we look at an article by Alex Crisp.
He has a series called Future Foods Interviews, and he spoke with Christy Legalli, who's the founder of Rebellious Foods out of the US, and she developed a way of manufacturing plant-based chicken, which she says, Can finally bring it to price parity with farmed chicken.
And she pointed out that a lot of companies that are producing plant-based meat analogs today are using meat equipment.
So, she rethought the way of doing it and also automated a lot of the process.
So, They, they're able to reduce labor by 90%.
And of course, that'll be a lot of cost savings.
Our next article is written by Kimberly Decker.
She's one of our regular contributing authors.
She's located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she attended the Future of Feud Tech San Francisco edition, and she came back with 4 different startups which she felt really embodied the atmosphere of the event.
So you can read some really inspiring stories here.
One was, OGT for one good thing.
I go back.
It was, there's an edible wrapper made out of beeswax.
So the idea was to create something that You know, like an apple, it doesn't need a wrapper.
You can just rinse it off and eat it.
And then Pear fat was also really interesting.
It's, it's a company that's using healthy fats, and then, processing them with microstructures to create, a product that has the same technical functionality as saturated fat, but then without the You know, the negative health.
Things that you would have with saturated fat.
Is ready to eat ready for the FDA's food traceability rule.
So the FDA has come out with a new rule to increase food traceability.
And it aims to do this on all the ingredients that are prone to contamination, like fresh salad.
They want to make them trackable and it, and for it to happen really fast so that the source of an outbreak can be identified within a day.
And the author of this piece is the technical director at IFT's Global Food Traceability Center.
And they have developed a lot of different tools to help the industry make this transition, which will have to be compliant by 2026.
This article is all about the advanced moves Latin American countries have made with Frontack labeling.
Latin America has been like the front runner.
They've been the first adopters of front of pack nutritional labeling, but there's also quite some inconsistencies between the different countries.
A lot of them use this black stop sign, but then some have, you know, additional warnings against the use of sweeteners, like Argentina, Mexico, in addition to warnings against sugar.
So, you know, the question is, What are food formulators in these countries going to do?
The sweeteners are being warned against, but also sugar.
It's definitely gonna be interesting to see how that develops.
In the Opinion Edge, we spoke to suppliers about the trends that they're seeing.
They're always the first, on the trends, and plant-based is definitely an important one.
But it all depends on flavor, so there is, some interesting ideas for ways to.
To approach a plant-based chicken, for example, like as an American barbecue or an Indian tandoori.
Overall, we see that 2 and 3 consumers globally are open to trying diverse cuisines.
So there's a lot of opportunity also for general, flavor enhancing ingredients.
To improve ready meals.
And in the health and wellness news, the Council for Responsible Nutrition came out with voluntary guidelines for melatonin in the US.
The organization is concerned about the overuse of melatonin and suggests, for example, that you don't add more than is listed on the package.
In the US it's already reaching the upper limit a lot of the time.
So, this article.
Very interesting.
It's all about the purpose of protein and helping aging and how our body really needs more of it as we get older.
The author spoke with a researcher.
He described that our ability to digest protein is like a dimmer switch.
So when we reach 40 or 50 years old, we slowly start to lose our ability to synthesize protein as , and he estimates that, you know, by the time you get down the age line, then you should maybe even double the amount of protein that a regular adult would have.
Now, Doctor Dan Gubler is a phytochemist and a supplement formulator with a social media presence.
You can find him at Doctor Dan Gur, and he observed that there's not too much attention.
To bioavailability and supplements.
So his article Gives a good breakdown of different techniques you can use, you know, where there are advantages, disadvantages.
If you have a product like CoQ10 that's hard to digest, what can you do to make it more absorbable?
In the sports nutrition arena.
We heard from Rick Collins.
He is an attorney who works in the nutrition community, and he warned about the use of SARMs, and these are selective androgen receptor modulators.
So, they have muscle building properties.
They selectively modulate skeletal muscle and bone, not other parts of the body, like the skin or the scalp.
So they've become really attractive for bodybuilders, especially through social media platforms.
But the FDA is warning that these are really dangerous and they're, they're unauthorized, even if it's written that it's for research purposes only, that, sort of going around that it's a loophole, but it's not still legal.
And lastly, We spoke with Jim Sally, who's the president and CEO of Ingredient, and he has some very exciting plans coming up.
He shared that last year for Ingredient, it was a record year in terms of revenue, in terms of operating income, earnings share, and they generated more than a billion dollars of cash.
So, they're looking for M&A opportunities that are going to be aligned with their strategy moving forward.
Which is all about texture, and it's all about healthy ingredients.
It's about , sort of like encapsulating consumer insights, sensory tests to bring this to customers and developing products where they can, you know, get feedback from consumers basically before, you know, while it's being developed.
So he sees this huge opportunity.
Specifically, he talked about ingredient on creating this language of texture called the Texicon, and he pointed out that in Japanese, there's 400 terms related to texture.
So, there's a real opportunity in English to develop it and also to help, you know, not only customers understand, but consumers understand and become more educated on what makes food so delicious.
So, if you hadn't, if you haven't subscribed, now is your chance.
You can do it with the QR code, and I will now open the floor for any questions.
So I'm checking to see the questions.
I will read them.
And answer them.
Oh, I see somebody actually already is answering the questions.
Whilst they're being asked.
OK.
Thank you for joining in on the conversation, Charles Armstrong.
The question was, can you get more information about how fermentation enhances the flavor of foods?
Doesn't it make it sour?
You know, a lot of fermented foods are sour, like sourdough, if you think about, you, you think about that.
I actually saw one study about how, in sourdough, that was the sourdough bread was able to have less of these, anti-nutritional factors, and they did attribute that to the, to the acid that was produced.
But also, I learned, through writing this article from Fermetics that some plant molecules have different polymers around them.
So, there are these Roma molecules that are unavailable for us to experience.
And then once the fermentation breaks those down, then they're, you know, they're made available to us.
So, there's all this potential that, you know, can, it's like just untapped.
And there's also more information from Charles Armstrong, for people who would like to check that out.
Are Japanese and Korean flavors here referring to Japanese flavor companies like Ajinamoto or Japanese cuisine signature flavors?
Yeah, it's more about the signature flavors.
So it'd be more about, yeah, like wasabi or It's like you have a very technical term here.
I don't think it's on the molecular level, but, yeah, like miso, things that are, representative of their cuisine.
If it's tracked, you know, as these numbers that I'm, I'm calling from are from our knowledge partner, Nova Market Insights, it would be tracked with, you know, Japanese claim.
So it would have been tagged as one of those flavors plus Japanese claim.
What's the fastest growing category for yeast ingredients?
Fastest growing category for yeast ingredients is pet food.
Right now, that's definitely where a lot of ingredients make their way first before they make it into to human food.
But in general, it's, it's so huge.
It's, you know, 1 in 10 products have yeast ingredients in them now.
So, it's also, you know, yeast protein sort of coming up as a new protein that's going to be like a, a tasty protein, or at least a neutral tasting protein.
And then I also saw recently the launch of a smoked yeast.
That came out and that also has a promising clean label approach because you don't have to use smoke flavor, which has also been getting some negative press.
OK, and Charles Armstrong also.
Answered another question.
Which was, what are some interesting examples that you've seen of fusion flavor?
Yeah.
Putting together this edition is always so exciting.
Every edition is exciting because you see new products that are coming to the market.
And one of the ones I really liked was the miso maple chicken.
And that was one that Charlie Bags talked about, because you're basically, you know, you're taking the umami, the salty component from one culture, and then you're combining it with maple, and this is for a US audience.
So, in this case, it's taking the Maybe a less familiar flavor of miso.
And then combine it with that staple maple flavor that, you know, all Americans know and love.
And that's a good one.
I'm just gonna refresh the page, make sure there's no more that came in.
All right.
So, a nice fun comment from Charles Armstrong.
Springy chew might be my favorite rheological term from Japanese.
Nice.
Yeah.
It's so interesting that there's so many terms in Japanese.
So, I, I'll be excited to see what kind of new terms, what sort of new language, ingredient develops for us all.
That is our time today.
It's been great presenting you the Ready Meals edition, and if you would like to read it, you can go to theworldoffood ingredients.com.
This is Missy Green signing off.
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