Fi Europe 2025: FrieslandCampina Ingredients on yoghurt as functional nutrition platform
15 Dec 2025 | FrieslandCampina Ingredients
Yoghurt is becoming a next-generation functional platform. Nadia Ustinova, global marketing innovation manager at FrieslandCampina Ingredients, shares how formulation breakthroughs deliver muscle, brain, and gut health benefits without sacrificing taste or texture, plus insights into multifunctional shakes and the consumer needs driving innovation across bars, shakes, and yoghurt for every life stage.
Fin Greens first reporting from FI Europe 2025 in Paris.
I'm here at the Friesen Campia ingredients stand with Nadia Ustanova, who is the global innovation marketing manager for early life nutrition.
Welcome to you.
Thank you very much.
So my first question, you're positioning yogurts as a next generation functional platform.
What formulation breakthroughs are enabling yogurt to deliver targeted benefits for muscle, brain, and gut health?
But without compromising taste or texture.
Exactly.
So as you said, this year we are very proud to present on the 2025 our yogurt solutions, and indeed sensory part has been a big, big part of our yogurt portfolio presentation.
To begin with, for the brain and cognitive development for kids and brain development and maintenance for adults and elderly people, we are highlighting our encapsulated.
Thanks to encapsulation technology, are less ox oxidized, which can deliver an absolutely excellent sensory performance for the end consumer without any fishy taste or odor, which is great because this is what normally prevents people from actually taking fish oil because it is derived either from algae or from fish which are both, as we know, is not very pleasant for our gut health.
Benefit in yogurt.
We are highlighting our galactic saccharides as we call it, and thanks to its pleasant, sweet taste and texture, it adds up a very pleasant sweetness to the yogurt, so we're not even using any additional flavorings.
It's just plain yogurt with goss, which is slightly sweet.
Imagine having maybe Greek yogurt with honey, but without this particular honey taste, just sweetness, and it also actually Supports in some countries even adding no added sugar claim or reduced sugar claim because it's fiber and not an extra added sugar.
And last but not least, thanks to our protein combination of Caenet and our Nutria proheat, we can achieve a very smooth and lovely texture in our added protein yogurt solutions without compromising a high level of protein in the yogurt.
So if we turn our attention to shakes, your shake concepts combine proteins, DHA and biotiss firmatis.
So what are brands asking for when developing multifunctional shakes?
Which formulation challenges come up most often in these builds?
I think that this is highly highly connected with the desire of the end consumer as.
We're, we're here to serve our customers, but they're here to serve consumers.
And the challenge is to have the sweet spot of the protein plus combination.
It could be our our fermented product which combines protein and galactosaccharide prebiotic.
It could be the DHA plus protein combination which is our focus shake which highlights, which supports the brain function and also vision and concentration for adults, so.
It always lays within the sensory and a rather good proportion of combining the protein and additional product because protein is not enough anymore, as you might know, it's a hygienic factor at this point in time.
OK, so you're showcasing applications for all life stages today.
Which, what sorts of consumer needs are driving the most innovation in bars, shakes, shakes and yogurts today?
We do see that what is happening in the consumer market is that the border between supplement and functional food is blurring, so consumers are asking the same things from their food and nutrition as they used to do from the pills or food supplements, and this is what creates a desire for a very targeted approach on the market, which would mean that we need to target kids, adults, elderly.
People separately, but also we need to target their health benefits separately.
There is no big immunity market anymore or big brain development.
There could be brain development, brain maintenance, eye vision, gut health, access function.
So we are going into extremely targeted claims and benefits which will take over the market in the next few years.
Thank you very much.
