Innovation in milk powders – targeting areas
07 Mar 2018 | Fonterra
Fonterra’s ingredients division NZMP is innovating in both superior performance dairy powders and sports nutrition. Dominic Cranfield, Product Manager Milk Powders at Fonterra says: “We took our instant whole milk powder and we conducted research into the variability that we see at different plants. At the same time, we talked to our customers about what they are looking for in a product. We came up with a couple of areas. The first is around reconstitution performance, which we tightened it up. We also looked like the powder appearance, which is important from a consumer experience perspective.”
Gun.
The Fonterra Teerrapa, site, and I'm joined here by Dominic Cranfield, who is the product manager milk powder at Fonterra.
Now, NFLP has been doing a lot of work in expanding its range of milk powders and really specializing a lot as , and there are two main platforms, Superior Performance and health and wellness.
So, yeah, the range has been expanded by quite a few products, but let's have a look at both these platforms, products each.
So how about for the superior performance, what's one of the highlights?
Within the innovations.
Sure, so we took our , our instant whole milk powder fortified with A&D which is a product we've been making for, for many years and and and most of our customers are familiar with.
And we did a real deep dive into the variability that we saw across that product coming out of our different plants.
And at the same time, we did a lot of talking to our customers about the things that they value in the product.
And we came up with a couple of areas.
And the first one is around reconstitution performance.
So when a customer, scoops some milk powder into their tea or into their glass of water and, and stirs it up and dissolves it, they're really looking for a product that, dissolves very, very fast, with no lumps or sedimentation or anything like that.
So we took a look at our product specification, and we tightened it up in those areas.
We also looked at things like the, powder appearance.
And so from a consumer experience perspective, our customers told us that they wanted their consumers to experience the same thing every time.
So we'd looked at the variability we were getting in terms of our powder appearance, and we've narrowed down the range of products, of, of factories, sorry, that we make this product at so that we get a really consistent, product appearance every time in the can, in the sachet, so that when a consumer's opening this, it's always looking exactly the same.
So those are two of the, the key areas with that gold product.
Absolute consistency of, of appearance and superior functionality on reconstitution.
Great.
Now within the health and wellness platform you have a new product which is low lactose which really goes into the free from trend obviously.
Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Yeah, sure.
So we know that a lot of consumers around the world are lactose intolerant to varying degrees.
But we're absolutely committed to being able to provide the the goodness of dairy to those customers, and consumers.
So we've developed this low lactose milk powder.
We have two variants.
We have a low lactose, which is less than 2%, and a zero lactose, which is less than 0.5% of lactose.
So it comes with all the benefits of, of, the milk protein and the other.
Important nutritional elements of milk, but with very low lactose, so consumers can get a, a really, good, physical response to that, with no digestive discomfort.
And it comes with the added bonus that it's, it's a sweeter product, as the lactose is broken down into glucose and galactose, and it gives the product a sweeter taste, but without any added sugar.
Now, NP milk powders are used, in a lot of different regions.
If you look at a few of these regions, what are, what sort of differences are you seeing in what consumers are really looking for, what businesses are looking for or any of your customers basically?
Yeah, sure.
So with our consumer milk powders, I guess the two big regions are Southeast Asia, and also the Middle East and Africa region.
And we find within each region, there's differing demands in terms of the nutritional content of the milk.
So we have developed, for example, different fortification.
Powders for different regions.
So we're starting to tailor our nutritional, offerings for different regions.
And also the way in which our consumers use their milk powder is different.
So the difference, for example, within the South Asia region to the Middle East region, the way they make up their milk powder, the flavor profile that they're used to is different.
So again, we find ourselves tailoring, the properties of the milk powder to different regions, based on consumer preferences.
Would you be able to give a bit of detail about different regions?
For example, I know we spoke about Middle East earlier.
What sort of demand or what sort of, Specifics are they looking for there?
So we developed a, a powder for, Saudi Arabia, and it's, we call it fortified plus.
So it's fortified with iron, zinc, and vitamins A, C, and D.
And we found that, there was a real pool for, that fortification set in that region.
It's an area where consumers might be a little more iron deficient, perhaps in some other areas.
So that was a really important, value proposition for them.
So it's very much around that cognition platform.
Iron is very important in that, in that area and also zinc.
So we tailored that formulation for the consumers in the Saudi region.
About IAC claims, how on these products, how important would they be?
So very important.
So we talk to our customers, about what claims they want to make on Pack.
Obviously we have to keep on the side of, government regulatory bodies, both here and, and in the markets, that we sell products into.
But yeah, so we talk to our customers about what claims they want to make and make sure that both from a Fonterra point of view and from, from their perspective, they're, that we're both comfortable with the claims that they're making.
OK.
In terms of what sort of areas looking into next application Is there anything you can kind of give away?
So we're definitely pursuing our health and wellness, platform.
So there's a number of other areas of, of health and, nutrition that we'd like to address.
So we've got a number of products in the pipeline there, for example, around the cognition platform.
So a couple of things in the pipeline there.
We think there's some absolutely fantastic components of dairy that, really do support, healthy brain development and function.
So we're, we're looking to leverage those.
We're also developing more in terms of the superior performance.
We're doing a lot of work in terms of lab testing and developing new test methods, really trying to replicate those consumer experiences so that we can be sure at our end that when we're testing our milk powder, it's telling us that it's gonna be absolutely superior from a consumer point of view, so quite a lot of development in that area too, and we hope to be able to bring some of those, to market and share those with our customers in the near future.
Yeah, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
