FDBusiness.com

Clean-label remains one of the key mega-trends in the food and beverage industry driven by consumer demand.

However, consumers are increasingly seeking out products made with ingredients that are familiar as well as natural, according to Lycored.

This desire for more transparency is leading to a massive upsurge in clearer labeling, says Lycored, with Innova Market Insights identifying a shift from ‘clean to clear’ as the top labelling trend for 2015.

Lycored is offering food manufacturers the opportunity to harness this trend with its range of Real Food Ingredients that deliver taste and texture improvement in a wide range of applications. Produced from 100 percent tomato, Lycored’s Real Food Ingredients make it possible to use simple label declarations that all consumers will recognize. Depending on local regulations, this includes straightforward statements such as ‘Tomato Concentrate’ or ‘Crushed Tomatoes’.

Solutions in the range include:

• Dry Tomato Pulp – a new ingredient, making it’s debut at this year’s Fi Europe, that combines an authentically fresh and vibrant red colour with a stable texture for red sauces (including pasta sauces), ketchups and soups. Dry Tomato Pulp does not turn brown, and is ideal for achieving colour consistency when facing variations caused by seasonality in tomato crops. It also works well as a natural colourant and texture improver in meat-based products such as sausages, in which many food colourants or starches are not permitted.

• SANTE – a taste enhancer that provides a high concentration of the natural compounds that produce umami (the fifth taste) and kokumi (the Japanese word for deliciousness) to accentuate existing flavour characteristics while remaining taste neutral. SANTE enables product formulators to create deliciousness naturally and reduce levels of ingredients that can be unattractive on the label, such as salt, MSG and yeast.

These ingredients, and others, will be presented by Lycored on Booth 6S45 at the forthcoming Fi Europe exhibition, which takes place in Paris from 1-3 December 2015. The theme on the stand will be: ‘Sharing nature’s wonder – from our garden to your kitchen’, which highlights how Lycored enables manufacturers to use ingredients from nature to create better-for-you products with labels that are both clean and clear.

Christiane Lippert, Marketing Manager at Lycored, said: “Clean label has been a major trend in the food industry for the past decade, with food and beverage manufacturers keen to highlight that their products are free from synthetic ingredients and additives. But today’s consumers are looking for more. They want to know what is in their food, not just what isn’t. They want their food to be made of recognizable natural ingredients and they want to know where those ingredients came from.”