Naturalness through flavors and fruit and vegetable snacking
28 Nov 2017 | Dohler
This is Elizabeth Green at Food Matters Live 2017.
I'm with Paul Thompson, who is the director of sales and food at DLA.
So Paul, can you tell me a little bit about what you are exhibiting at this year's show?
We're promoting very much our natural ingredients and following the trends that are on the marketplace at the moment, which include naturalness, obviously.
We also have sugar reduction, which is a big focus for us, as as free from, and also we can't forget that people still like things to taste good, so it has to be indulgent, some element of indulgence.
And in terms of snacking, what are you seeing in the snacking arena?
People always liked fruit snacking.
We're seeing a lot of movements into the vegetable snacking as.
So we've got freeze dried fruits and freeze dried vegetables to go into those those areas.
They're also looking for the sugar reduction in those areas and also.
Salt reduction in those areas, which is where Dola can help with our capabilities in both flavor enhancement, so in sweetness boosting and also the same as salt reduction.
Yeah, because obviously salt reduction's been kind of a thing in the industry for some time.
How about sugar reduction?
Do you think that's a trend that's here to stay?
It is definitely.
Definitely in the UK it's very, very, very big for us, as we all know, definitely in the beverages and the sugar tax coming around next April, that we expect will be pushed in some format into the other areas of food.
Obviously when it comes to bakery, you take sugar out, it's more difficult to create a , a biscuit, for example, that won't shatter.
So we have to be making sure that we've got raw materials that can help in that process, although I don't know whether it'll be the same extent as they'll be doing for soft drinks.
Yeah, now I've noticed you've got some interesting flavor combinations.
Maybe you can expand a little bit on that.
Yeah, we've, once again, we've looked at some of the ingredients.
So we have, so we have mango is one of them.
We have curry, so we have some curry powders we can do.
So we have the sweet and savory side of things, coupling it together to have snacking.
So perfect with a beer, that would be, then we also move on to other things which are more traditional, so maybe children friendly as.
We go for the usual fruit elements of it.
And what we're also focusing on is our binders because our binders are very good where you, the process we do it, you don't have to use so much sugar, but the the level of sugar within those products is less than you would have in a normal sugar binder.
Therefore, you have a naturally low, lower sugar level.
Yeah, fantastic.
And in terms of sourcing, are there any sort of areas where sourcing for raw ingredients is becoming a challenge?
Vanilla is, is everybody's challenge at the moment, and due to the crops and the way that vanilla is created, it takes 1 to 2 years to, probably 2 years to recover, so it's here for a while, so we're looking at different flavor options to try and help when you're using extract to try and help improve that, and then we're also.
The other aspects are, citrus.
There's been some hurricanes in, in the America, so California area, so, so we're in Florida area, sorry.
So we've had to look at the what we can do to make sure the citrus supplies continue.
However, we're fortunate that ours come out of Brazil, which is the largest, largest citrus producing area in the world.
So yeah, we're good at citrus.
Brilliant, thank you very much.
