Wednesday, September 17, 2008

More Free Advice for Product Developers

Every time I pick up a trade magazine it seems like the functional food industry continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Even to the point where functional foods are slowly replacing traditional foods.

Fish oils and green tea are BIG business right now, an can be found in everything from milk and yogurt to bread.

(It's actually getting hard to find foods that haven't been fortified with SOMETHING)

So...after fish oils (which are a product development NIGHTMARE)..and after green tea (not as bad as fish oil to work with, but still makes flavoring a product horrible) what's next?

Well, here's my thought.

Vegetables are going to make a comeback.

Why?

They have a good story..and they are MUCH easier to work with than fish oils or green tea.

For instance (and here's the million dollar free advice)

You can bake adding in vegetable purees...they are easy to work with, add great flavor and compliment most bread products very nicely

...And if you can bake with them then they will be easy to do product development work with.

For instance...listen up General Mills...you could easily fortify breakfast cereal with vegetables.

Sweet potato Cheerios would ROCK (I'll take a 5% royalty for that one).

So added to Brad's list of nutrition predictions...I hereby boldly add that after green tea and fish oils become old news...watch for vegetables to make there way into your breads and cereals.

Just some thing different for today,

BP

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It wouldn't be such a bad thing to have more veggies:) It'll be interesting to see your cereal greens in the stores! I found an awesome sight with great recipes. www.beachbodybabe.com

Brad Pilon said...

Hi Sally,

Thanks for the comment.

I noticed that you have commented on more than two dozen of my posts in the last couple minutes.

I will keep the relevant ones, but any that are only the url for your site will be deleted.

BP

Sara said...

Brad, veges are already making a comeback. I'm getting requests to add 'green/blue/red powders' to all sort of products. Not just vege powders but fruit powders, especially berries. Although it's not the same as eating a real vege, most of the good stuff seems to withstand the freeze drying process. In NZ I think this is being driven by the fact that in some markets (i.e. Aussie) a berry powder is treated as a 'food' (not highly regulated) but an extracted active (i.e. resveratrol from Giant Knotweed) is a 'therapeutic' and highly regulated.

Anonymous said...

Very interesting comments about veggies. The seeds are packed with antioxidants and vitamins. The flours and oils can be used in a variety of applications from cosmetics to functional foods.

Our company works with lots of individuals using fruit and vegetable oils and flours for lots of neat applications, and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the next few years.

And with veggies, even the disgusting tasting ones are 100X better than fish oil.

Brad Pilon said...

Hi Sara,

You brought back horrible memories of arguing with the TGA in Australia and paying lawyers countless dollars trying to figure out their rules.

The TGA is what government body that acts FAST, and can change a rule almost overnight!

BP