Combining flavor and taste portfolios
20 Jul 2018 | IFF
At IFT this year, International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) presented PowderPure under its portfolio for the first time, some 18 months after the initial acquisition of the young US-based company. “PowderPure has a very interesting drying technology that allows us to produce very clean and concentrated fruit and vegetable powders. These are certainly relevant to the natural trend and the desire for cleaner labels that we see in the marketplace,” Carmen Cain at the company, tells FoodIngredientsFirst. “They are able to take whole fruits and vegetables and run them along a conveyor belt. By using infrared light that targets the water molecule, they are able to end up with a very pure powder that retains color, nutrition and taste.”
This is Rob Wires of the IFT Food Expo in Chicago, and I'm here with Carmen Kane from IFF.
Carmen, what you're really doing here at the show is to kind of highlight the bringing together of Taste Point, which you started about a year ago, and the powder pure together with the classic kind of IFF flavors portfolio.
Maybe you can first speak a little bit about Powder pure and, and, what it brings to your kind of agenda, maybe where some of the correlations are between the, how this technology can be adopted.
Sure, Powder Pure was a company that we acquired about 18 months ago now.
They have a very interesting drying technology that allows us to.
Very clean, very concentrated fruit and vegetable powders that certainly are relevant to the natural trend we see in the marketplace and the desire for cleaner labels.
They're able to take whole fruits, whole vegetables, run them along a conveyor and using infrared light targeted very specific.
The water molecule, end up with a very pure powder that retains color, nutrition, taste, and also has some interesting functional benefits in terms of adding texture to many of the formulations as.
What are some of the things that you've worked together on then and what have you been testing so far?
But Powder Pure is a relatively new start-up organization in itself, so we've been doing a lot of testing of, of the product and the technologies.
We've seen it to be very interesting in terms of, a couple of areas, very good in, in bars, cereal, and other forms of snack bars.
It's adding great color, great taste.
Low microactivity in the powders, so that can be quite advantageous, particularly for some of those profiles where there's typically a high level of, of microactivity, good dispersion of flavor, but we've seen it in a bar, for example, have a very nice binding effect without the need to use other gums or starches or stabilizers, but still with a very nice mouth feel and texture.
One of the other exciting areas has been that whole concept of stealth health or providing nutrition to children that tastes good, so we've played with a , a mac and cheese, what child doesn't like mac and cheese, but we're able to use the sweet potato and the pumpkin powder pures.
To provide a, a mac and cheese formulation that looks like, tastes like, and, has the mouthfeel of, of a traditional mac and cheese, but it provides a serving of vegetables, all of the fiber, all of the nutrition, benefit, of eating fresh fruit and vegetable, in the, the powder pure material going into the mac and cheese.
Also, We're able to use it in a vanilla pudding, so it looks like, tastes like, and acts like a vanilla pudding, only provides again a serving of vegetable and all of the nutrition of a vegetable without the child being aware of that.
So good for kids and good for parents.
Hard sometimes to get good nutrition into kids.
Very good.
OK, and it's been a year since you launched the Taste Point platform, which really targets the.
Of the small, medium kind of size enterprises.
What's, what's been kind of the response from industry and how, how has it been performing so far?
Yeah, so Taste Point was the bringing together of of Otton's flavors and David Michael flavors, both of which had a position within the mid-tier or smaller to medium customers in the market.
We brought them together as Taste 0.1 year ago.
In fact, we launched at IFT this time last year.
And the response from customers has really been very positive.
I think they're very glad to see that we've left Tastepoint, separated or at arm's length from IFF so it continues to be able to be a, a, an entrepreneurial style of organization that can work very closely with small to medium start-up organizations, retaining that agility, flexibility, speed to market, rapid prototyping.
Smaller MOQs, things that are important to organizations that are going through rapid growth.
But at the same time we're able to feed into Tas point all of the R&D capabilities, technologies, sensor and consumer insights capabilities of, of IFF.
So it gives them, that opportunity to play with really good technology, but in a way that's suited to small, changing organizations, and we see in those customers, Needs that we don't necessarily see with larger customers, they're really, they see something, they read something, they change their labeling, they change their positioning, often several times as they're starting to iterate a product, and the ability to move with them, and prototype for them, to work with them collaboratively, and be able to support that dynamic has been received.
The feeling seems to be that maybe some of the, the tradition, Fruitteron portfolio may be utilized in a similar kind of manner to this, that this type of strategy may be adopted in other sides of the world.
Yes, Fruiton, we're in early days.
We haven't closed yet, so we're still unable to finalize a strategy, but certainly we see some synergies between the Fruiteron portfolio, the type of customers, the market that they're in.
And the fact that they're really present in some parts of the market that IFF are currently not present in, in different parts of the world, that that case point model, the way of working with small to medium customers, that's very localized, and it's very synergistic with, with the needs of customers with, with a, a fast pace, should make, sense in terms of looking at Fruiterro and and how we would integrate them in the future, something to look out for.
Absolutely.
OK, Carmen, thank you very much.
Thank you.
