Cost vs quality sparks Tate & Lyle platform
The ingredients firm has been operating two development platforms for the last couple of years: Rebalance, intended to help reduce products’ levels of nutrients people should eat less of, like saturated fat and salt; and Enrich, to add in nutrients that people should eat more of, like fibre.
The new platform, called Optimize, is intended to address formulation cost. While food manufacturers are always looking to make the best tasting product for as little outlay as possible, the company points to findings of consumer research that suggest consumers are even keener for cheaper food products in the recession – but they expect the quality to remain the same.
Tate & Lyle says it has developed a range of sweetening and texturising solutions that can help meet these double-edged expectations.
“Our application experts do wonders building cost effective recipes with top class ingredients like fructose, Spenda sucralose, glucose-fructose syrups, starches, hydrocolloids and starches,” said Caroline Sanders, marketing director food and industrial ingredients.
The platform will be employed at the company’s new Health & Wellness Innovation Centre in Lille, France. Costing €4m, the centre opened last year and has a number of pilot application areas where customers can try out the ingredient solutions.
Systems for keeping costs down
Tate & Lyle is not the only ingredients company addressing formulation cost reductions by bringing new systems on board.
For instance, National Starch unveiled its Precisa system for ‘dialling in’ desired texture attributes in June. Amongst other benefits, such as improving the fat profile, this can help with the reduction of especially costly ingredients.
Cargill, too, approaches cost challenges through its functional systems, which involves close monitoring of market needs and selection of the best-adapted and best-priced raw materials for a particular purpose.
