Trends shaping the sweets and snacks sector
04 Feb 2019 | Koelnmesse
Custom-made products for individual consumer were under focus at this year's ISM. Hereby the manufacturers took into account the consumers' growing need for a healthier and more sustainability-conscious diet. In addition to vegetarian and vegan as well as gluten-free and lactose-free offers, products with vegetable-based proteins, natural ingredients and sustainably grown raw materials were among the most important trends of the trade fair. A range of sugar-free/sugar-reduced and fat or salt-reduced sweets and snacks were exhibited at ISM 2019 too. Sabine Schommer of Koelnmesse, the ISM 2019 organizers, discusses the trends shaping the sweets and snacks sector, including how the snacking sector is facing up to increased competition.
This is Rob Wire at the ISM in Cologne.
I'm here with Sabine Schmmer, who is from the organizer of the ISM, the Kil Nessa.
Sabine, what are, what are some of the key trends that you see here at the ISM, trade floor, and what are some exhibitors telling you about the state of the confectionery industry in, 2019?
I think one of the important trends is healthy snacking.
Yeah, the regular meals like breakfast, lunch and dinner are more and more substituted by by on the go snacks.
People are busy, they are working, but, when they are on the go, they want or they still look for a healthy treat.
So we have introduced 5 years ago, our new snacks area.
And it is growing tremendously.
We started 3 years ago, so fruit and vegetable snacks, jerky, meat snacks, vegan ice cream, all these kinds of things, sugar reduced, fat reduced items.
So we started 5 years ago with just 3 exhibitors, and this year, after only 5 years, we are already here with 58 companies, and I think this speaks for itself.
A second trend that I would name is sustainability.
We have just awarded the packaging price to a company who invented, , the Santa Claus, the chocolate Santa Claus is usually wrapped in aluminum foil, and they invented.
Special paper to wrap the chocolate hollow figures in.
You can print on the paper so it looks attractive, but at the same time this paper is 100% biodegradable.
So because we all have these pictures in our minds, the plastic plastic.
Garbage in the sea and this is something which is really haunting people and this is something they want to they are looking to find solutions for so sustainability is also an important trend all these fat reduced sugar.
This is a big trend which is also visible at our sister fair Prouiss Cologne.
They have a reformulation area and they also do guided tours on reformulation because when you want to change the recipe, you cannot just leave out the sugar because you have to replace it by something, but.
In addition to finding maybe new ingredients, there are also ways in production where you can change something and you end up with a healthier or or a product with less fat, for instance.
That's really interesting, and I think just going back to your initial theme about the snacking trend.
Because I guess what what's happened a lot is there's been somewhat of an evolution in snacking and virtually anything can be considered a snack.
Now far beyond what the traditional kind of savory snack options were.
Do you see somewhat of a kind of a counter trend where these companies are having to innovate in order to stay relevant when there is so much competition?
I think there's one important topic, and that is still indulgence.
When we reformulate when we taste reformulated products, OK, we want to have something with less fat or less salt, but still we want to have it to have the same taste as the traditional product, so I think the indulgence thing.
Is still very important because people don't like to compromise on taste and if they eat snacks, snacks, sweets and snacks stands only for 5% of our nutrition input, and we don't eat sweets or snacks in the first way for good.
For our healthy food, but we want to indulge and we want a little moment, a little break, something like that.
And so yeah, the taste is really the most important thing about it, and this is something where you can't compromise.
And I guess that's something that the industry is repeating a lot when there's a big discussion about maybe taking the sugar tax issue.
To the snack confection area too.
Yeah, but when you, when you go for a sweet, you know it is sweet and it has sugar, but if you keep your, your, if you keep a balanced diet where the sweets make only 5% of your whole nutrition input, then this is something where you may be lenient on yourself.
Things to keep in mind.
Thank you very much.
