Dawn Farms Drives Innovation in Healthier Meat Ingredients

20 Sep 2013 --- Dawn Farms, a leading supplier of cooked and fermented meats to the international food industry, is putting trends into practice to drive innovation in healthier meat ingredients.

The Irish company supplies ingredients to a wide range of leading brand names in the food manufacturing and foodservice sectors throughout Europe.

It has adopted the Consumer Lifestyle Trends programme developed by leading food development agency Bord Bia – Irish Food Board. This has allowed Dawn Farms analyse trends and drive innovation to give the company a solid foundation for future forecasting to identify profitable, incremental opportunities on healthier meat ingredients.

“Food innovation is one of the essential building blocks of our business,” said John McGrath, the company’s Business Development and Communications Director. “Our customers, who are leaders in their chosen sectors, demand this kind of ‘trend relevance’ from us on all the innovative new meat ingredients and toppings we supply.”

Two of the key mega trends the company has identified in the market place are ‘quest for health and wellness’ and ‘sustainable lives’. ‘Quest for health and wellness’ indicates consumers wanting to be able to manage or improve their health and wellness through making better choices. ‘Sustainable lives’ refers to products that create less negative impact on the world, giving consumers a feel good factor that doesn’t harm their wallets.

Both trends are embodied by Dawn Farms’ recently unveiled health and nutrition programme, which builds on significant progress to date in this area. The new programme sets out to:

•     use only natural flavours and colours
•     develop new products in line with Food Standards Agency salt targets set in 2012
•     minimise the use of allergens and use alternative if available
•     reduce and limit saturated fats for healthier portion sizes

“In terms of the areas above, we have identified a genuine desire among our customer base for ingredients which respond to consumer demand for foods with fewer allergens,” said John. “At the same time, we noticed an increase in activity from 2010 onwards in the level of new product development on ‘gluten-free’ foods. This forecasting allowed us to get ahead of the curve in developing our own meatball with no gluten-containing ingredients.

“This new meatball is perfect for pizza and ready meal applications – and features no gluten-containing ingredients. This is directly in line with the company’s market research under the ‘quest for health and wellness’ trend.

He added: “In addition to allergen removal, we have undertaken an extensive salt reduction programme for our customers. We have already removed over 12t of salt from products sold to the market and we continue to work with customers on an on-going basis to minimise the presence of salt in their bespoke product ranges.”

“Another area is the elimination of artificial flavours by targeting and removing MSG from all specifications. All artificial colours and flavours have now been removed from our Foodservice Range of pizza toppings and sandwich meats, all products are free of artificial flavours and we will complete the removal of the last remaining colour by end 2013. As of 2012, none of the products we produce contain any added hydrogenated fats.

“Overall, our facility in Naas is recognised as the most modern meat technology operation of any cooked meat factory in the European Union. We declared it a nut-free facility two years ago. More recently, we have become actively engaged in reducing the number of allergens on site, in particular lactose and celery.”