ofi introduces cascara powder, talks flavor trends and hybrid dairy
15 Jan 2024 | ofi
ofi recently introduced an upcycled-certified, standardized coffee fruit powder that can add fruity, sweet and tart notes to a variety of applications. Defne Saral, SVP of sales EMENA at ofi, shares more on the cascara ingredient, flavor trends in confectionery and ofi's dairy footprint expansion in Asia.
This is Missy Green with Food ingredients first at FIE 2023.
I'm here with Daphna Sorell, who is the senior vice president of sales at OFI.
So what are some of the upcycling innovation trends happening at OFI?
We're in Germany and Germany is very much into upcycled products.
How can we use everything in our agriculture?
So everybody knows about coffee, but do you know that a coffee actually looks like this?
And so that's the whole coffee.
The coffee fruit, and oftentimes the fruit gets thrown away and the coffee bean is the only thing that's retained.
So cascara is actually taking the coffee fruit and turning it into a useful ingredient.
And what we've done in this particular case is we've taken it and put it into a beverage.
So this is a sparkling beverage and it's upcycled certified so that people know that they're using the whole fruit and the whole product.
So is this a recent innovation from OFI?
Yes, this is a new ingredient that we've introduced this year.
And we have facilities in Indonesia, so we have a standardized powder for cascara that we're able to promote in a variety of products.
So this goes into a beverage but could also go into a cookie or a biscuit or an ice cream.
We're big in confectionery, particularly in chocolates, and we're wondering how we could use it as a novel flavor to be able to add fruitiness, sweetness, and a bit of tartness.
I'm asking because I'm wondering what your outlook is for confectionery trends in the next year.
We've done some work with a tool called AI palette to analyze flavors, what is big coming up in chocolates, and one of the things that we realized is that in Europe and in the United States, more exotic flavors like yuzu or matcha are the things that are trending and becoming interesting for those consumers.
And when we go to Asia, actually flavors like caramel or marshmallow or more classic sort of European flavors are the ones that those consumers are interested in.
So we're seeing actually a switch of flavors going on.
OK, so exotic flavors depending on where you are.
What is exotic for you depends on where you live.
So for some marshmallows are exotic and for others yuzu are exotic.
Very good.
So what about the new dairy facilities in Malaysia and New Zealand?
How does that complement's existing footprint across the sector?
Those are really exciting developments for us because we've been in dairy for some time.
We've been trading dairy products around the world and we've got a lot of presence there, but bringing in Malaysia where we have a fat-filled milk powder plant and we've doubled.
Its capacity, and then opening our New Zealand plant, together with the farmers in New Zealand that have one of the most sustainable footprints, is also bringing a whole new kind of whole milk powder to the market.
So how's that strengthening your co-creation capacity in the region?
For customers, we get to be able to talk to them about what kinds of milks or beverages or yogurts or.
Strings or other applications that they'd like to be in, and knowing that we are manufacturing our own ingredients helps us open that door.
In Malaysia, it's also the plant, but also the ingredient excellence center for dairy.
So we have experts in all of those kinds of dairy applications that can really talk to how the ingredient works in the final product and be able to help our customers work through those calculations.
So I've seen here at the trade show various companies proposing hybrid type scenarios for plant and animal based, and that's sort of like a way of lowering the carbon footprint, increasing the health scores.
Is that also something that is looking into?
Yeah, combinations are interesting for us since we're both in dairy and also in nuts.
If you're working in the dairy space and it could be plant-based or cow-based, we can offer both of those.
So in plant-based dairy, people are looking for texture and flavor, and they might have found that the first introductions were a little bit flat.
So the kinds of work that we're doing with our nut ingredients is really helping to boost the creaminess, boost the texture.
And if people want To combine that with a traditional dairy product, we're able to do both quite easily.
Have you had any customers say, All right, we're ready to start launching hybrid products on the market, or is it still too soon for that?
I think for customers they are still traditionally in the dairy or in the plant-based space.
Seeing that mixture and crossover is something that I'm hoping will come in the years.
All right, thank you so much.
