Innovation in Sustainable Proteins and the Mainstreaming of Sports Nutrition
14 Dec 2016 | Convance
I'm Elizabeth Kenwood.
I'm here with Nick Henson, who's the senior technical manager at Covent's Food Solutions at London Food Masters Lab 2016.
So Nick, can you tell me a little bit about the growth lab?
Yeah, sure, thanks Elizabeth.
Yeah, we're on the growth lab stands today.
We know from the marketplace that a very significant amount of innovation is currently, coming through the entrepreneurs and small to medium enterprises.
That's a focus for the show, and it's a focus for the growth lab.
The growth lab brings together a number of service providers who can help in that total innovation process.
So right through all the development stages, helping with market intelligence, helping with legal aspects, there's funding agents, there are patent guys.
Side and we're very much focused on that core product development, so helping the practical elements, realizing people's concept to a product that would end up on the shelf.
What things do you see in today's today's food industry that COVIDs can kind of help with and aid.
We've seen over the years big interest in nutrition.
And for us that's evolved into quite a big focus on sports nutrition.
So originally for maybe elite athletes but really now moving mainstream.
So, companies that are looking to provide sports products for the everyday, athlete or the weekend athlete, and this is a big growth area.
So this takes us into protein fortification.
It takes us into vitamins and minerals.
It takes us into specialist materials like caffeine for endurance.
So it's spawned a whole series of different ingredient blends and end products.
OK, and now in terms of innovation for sports and nutrition, is there anything that particularly stands out for you at this moment in time?
I think a lot of it has been how to get protein consumption in a palatable form.
Because what the consumers maybe appreciate less is protein is not a particularly tasty material, so it's about using, for example, dairy proteins that are quite refined and getting them into let's say a beverage format that's palatable at the levels that will have an impact on their performance.
And we see that moving.
Away from just dairy into plant proteins, so you'll have soya and nuts and a whole range of different vegetable-based proteins that satisfy the need for non-animal based protein sources.
So quite, some quite interesting shifts going on.
What in terms of the shift away from animal proteins, why do you think this has happened?
Why do you think this is so kind of common?
I think there's this feeling about sustainability to some extent.
And we know that there's Pressure to avoid animal consumption generally, but plant sources are obviously more sustainable.
They fit in with the trend of increasing trend for vegetarianism, veganism, so I think it fits a number of the trends.
And also these materials are now becoming more commercially available.
So we can now get some quite interesting, good quality, soya protein, pea protein, rice protein, which weren't really available 5, 10 years ago.
Yeah.
OK, thank you very much.
OK, thanks.
