Taste and Nutrition are Kerry’s Key Components

02 Dec 2016 --- With sales to over 140 countries worldwide, Kerry, the taste & nutrition company, has grown to become a highly successful public company, having achieved sustained profitable growth with current annualized sales in excess of €6 billion (US$6.39 billion). In recent years, Kerry has positioned itself more and more around taste and nutrition, aligning to changes in the marketplace. During Hi Europe, FoodIngredientsFirst caught up with Kerry's EMEA CEO Malcolm Sheil to talk trends, future developments and the importance of taste within the nutritional space. 

“Taste is linked to nutrition so much, you can’t separate them really from a sustainable long-term standpoint that’s why we link it all together and that’s been our journey for about the last five or six years, reorganizing how we think about things and becoming much more consumer focused. The whole organization needs to be thinking about how we can move with the market base,” he says. 

“We come from a food background so what we’re doing to deliver taste and deliver nutrition is from food and we’re really focusing our efforts on clean label, transparency and kitchen cupboard - that’s really going to keep on going more and more.”

Sheil says consumers are looking for great tasting authentic food that packages nutrition and taste together. In established and emerging markets, nutrition is a key component for general wellbeing and more people are paying closer attention to the nutritional components of their food. 

This trend also transcends different consumer groups; from infants to the elderly. 

“We see clearly that future growth in the market is going to be driven by combining great taste with nutritionally optimized food. Kerry is in a prime position to deliver on these core market drivers as they are both fundamental parts of our business.”

“It’s not just the young millennial who is worried about sugar and salt intake, the older generation is just as concerned about their nutrition, and we see this as another trend driving the market. We’re also looking at protein, a key part of nutrition. It’s well know from a infant standpoint and in sports nutrition and it’s now getting much more into ‘help the aged’ as well.”

“People want to eat the right protein to minimize muscle loss. This also concerns taste and flavor because sometimes in pure vegetable proteins for example, the taste is not great so you need to have a flavor component in there as well.” 

Kerry has identified four broad market drivers to focusing on within the marketplace; Free-from, better for you, good for you and tailored for you and is meeting these platforms in different ways.

In gluten free, it has solutions for the bakery industry to improve the quality of the gluten free products, particularly bread. Traditionally the taste of these poor quality breads has been improved using higher levels of salt and fat and Kerry has developed a technology that can offer the same volume, taste, nutrition and texture profile, but without any gluten and it’s focusing efforts on the American market. 

During the conversation FoodIngredientsFirst also asked about regulations like sugar tax as well as the geopolitical landscape; Brexit and president-elect Trump and potential changes to trade deals. 

“A lot of supermarkets are trying to be ahead of trends, ahead of regulations - we see the UK bringing in sugar tax and in France they have the traffic light system the same as in the UK, so we’re trying to stay ahead of that.”

“We definitely see Brexit as an opportunity from the standpoint of the Irish and UK market have an extremely manufacturing footprint and it could be a lot easier for us compared with some other suppliers. We see it as an opportunity, not a threat and we have a team around this and we will really go after it.” 

Getting ahead of the game is important to Kerry and it's not necessarily waiting for Article 50 to be officially evoked before making plans. 

“The political change, be it Trump or Brexit, doesn’t change consumption that much. Our global footprint is very good with over 100 factories around the world and so if something like the trade barriers proposed by president-elect Trump were to happen, and that’s an if, then we are well set up for it.”

Going forward, although Kerry doesn’t necessarily have its eye on one particular area in terms of its business expansion, but it’s always potentially interested in companies with a strong scientific portfolio.

“We are always interested in those companies that have some solid science behind their work and we like it to be on trend. Globally we have three key pillars of growth; taste, nutrition and developing markets which is very important and will do this through our positioning, we will be transferring technologies out.”

In which developing markets would you like to see more growth? “We still think there are great opportunities in APAC, although there is not one specific country, we’ve been doing some work in the Philippines, Indonesia, and China is quite strong at this point. India is probably the country where there could be the biggest accelerators.” 

Established in 2015, the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute aims to interpret what nutrition means for the food industry focusing on science, policy, health and general wellness. Scientific Advisory Council members augment the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute with their learnings on scientific advancements in the areas of general wellness and nutrition for future nutritional and technology innovation. 

by Gaynor Selby