7 ingredients on the decline: overview
- Food makers are dropping once-essential ingredients due to clean-label trends, cost pressures and supply risks
- Ingredients including modified starches, carrageenan, DATEM and calcium propionate are increasingly falling out of favour
- High cocoa prices are driving interest in alternatives such as carob and fava bean
- Lecithin is being replaced in some applications due to supply, cost and allergen concerns
- Reformulation is complex, with replacements often raising costs or affecting product quality
For decades, food manufacturers had a simple formula for making products cheaper, tastier, brighter or longer-lasting: adding the right ingredient. Now the direction of travel is being reversed.
Familiar staples are being questioned, not because they have suddenly become illegal, but because factors like climate change, volatile prices, and increasingly suspicious consumers are making them harder to love.
Some of these shifts, such as the backlash against artificial sweeteners and synthetic colours, have been making headlines for years. Others are happening much more quietly, with ingredients that once seemed indispensable gradually falling out of favour without attracting nearly as much attention.
This is driving a major reformulation exercise. Removing an ingredient is rarely as simple as taking it off the label. Manufacturers still need to reproduce its taste, texture or functionality, often with a more expensive or less technically effective alternative. In some cases, the replacement may even create a new sustainability or nutritional trade-off.
Europe is where food reformulation often starts: its health-conscious, clean-label consumers are among the world’s most demanding, and trends that take hold here can soon travel far beyond the continent.
Here are seven ingredients European food makers are increasingly questioning – and what they are putting in their place.
1) Modified starches - too industrial for a clean label
For food formulators, modified starches have long been something of a workhorse. They thicken, stabilise and improve texture, while shrugging off the heat, acidity and mechanical stress that can send ordinary starches off course.
The trouble starts when this behind-the-scenes workhorse becomes visible to consumers on the ingredient list. The very word “modified” can make an otherwise familiar ingredient sound artificial and heavily processed – matching precisely the kind of terminology that clean-label shoppers increasingly want to avoid.
In addition, there is an important labelling distinction: chemically modified starches are treated as additives and can carry E-numbers, whereas native or enzymatically modified starches can be declared simply as ‘starch’ from the relevant source.
The available alternatives are surprisingly varied. Manufacturers can turn to functional native starches derived from maize, tapioca or potato, but some are going further, using citrus fibre, pulses and even seaweed-derived hydrocolloids. These ingredients can often replicate the thickening and stabilising effects of modified starch, though in some applications, a combination of ingredients is needed to achieve the necessary result.
2) Cocoa – too expensive to take for granted
Historically, cocoa was one of those ingredients food manufacturers simply had to work around. If you wanted chocolate, there was no obvious alternative. But the ingredient manufacturers once treated as indispensable is rapidly becoming a source of pain.
In recent years, cocoa prices have been on a rollercoaster. Prices that traded around $2,500/t in early 2023 surged above $12,000/t in 2024, following several back-to-back poor harvests in key producing countries, including Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Although the price situation has somewhat stabilised, cocoa was still trading at around $6,000/t in August 2026 – more than twice its pre-crisis level.
These price swings resulted in a new formulation question: how much cocoa does a product really need? Manufacturers are exploring ways to reduce the amount of cocoa powder or cocoa solids, looking into alternatives and extenders like carob, roasted sunflower seeds, fava beans and grape seeds, among others.
Yet the switch is proving difficult. Cocoa contributes bitterness, aroma, colour and texture, meaning that a chocolate product containing less cocoa may be more resilient to commodity shocks, but also be a very different product.
3) Carrageenan – too useful to lose, too controversial to keep
Carrageenan has quietly been holding food products together for decades. Extracted from red seaweed, the hydrocolloid can thicken, stabilise and gel products, helping give a long list of food products such as dairy desserts the creamy, consistent texture manufacturers want. It is remarkably effective at doing all of this, often at very low concentrations.
But carrageenan is increasingly facing a reputational problem. E407 is exactly the sort of unfamiliar, chemical-sounding ingredient that clean-label reformulation is designed to eliminate.
The replacement toolbox is surprisingly broad. Pectin, native starches, xanthan gum and other hydrocolloids can reproduce some of carrageenan’s functions, depending on the application. But, despite years of work, the food industry increasingly acknowledges that there is no universal one-for-one substitute.
Cargill, which has been suggesting pectin as a label-friendly replacer, admitted that it can work well in cold-filled desserts, for example, but cannot reproduce carrageenan’s full range of textures and is unsuitable for some high-protein or multi-layered applications. The company also noted that it may require a higher dosage, adding to formulation costs.
4) Lecithin – when even a natural emulsifier is problematic
Lecithin is one of the food industry’s most versatile emulsifiers. Since it is plant-derived, it has traditionally fitted comfortably into the clean-label toolbox. But even lecithin is not immune to the reformulation squeeze.
Sunflower lecithin, in particular, has become a supply-chain headache in recent years, especially after disruptions in Eastern Europe sent prices to record highs. At some point, the cost of liquid and de-oiled sunflower lecithin powder has increased by three to four times, sending shockwaves along the supply chain.
Kerry developed a clean-label system specifically to replace sunflower lecithin in plant-based beverages. The company cited supply challenges and price instability as the rationale behind the initiative.
The problem with lecithin is not limited to sunflower. Soy lecithin can raise allergen and GMO concerns, leading some manufacturers to switch to sunflower or rapeseed lecithin, both of which can offer a simpler label in some applications.
There are a few effective replacement alternatives on the table. Acacia gum, harvested from acacia trees, can provide the emulsification and stability manufacturers need. Kerry’s Puremul uses just acacia and natural flavour to replace sunflower lecithin, with the company reporting successful 1:1 replacement in some formulations.
5) Calcium propionate – the price of a longer-lasting loaf
Another victim of the clean-label movement, calcium propionate has long been widely used in the industrial bread and bakery industry to suppress mould and extend shelf life, particularly in packaged bread.
But consumers increasingly associate a long chemical-sounding additive name with a highly processed product, even though calcium propionate is an established and permitted food preservative.
The irony is that removing calcium propionate, which is believed to be completely safe, can potentially undermine one of the industry’s sustainability goals. If the replacement shortens shelf life or raises costs, manufacturers must weigh a cleaner label against more food waste and resource use.
On top of that, removing it from formulation proved to be technically difficult. Bread is particularly vulnerable to mould and simply eliminating the preservative can shorten shelf life significantly.
Companies explore fermented ingredients, vinegar and acetate-based systems, cultured wheat or flour, but these alternatives aren’t necessarily equivalent. According to manufacturers, they can be expensive, affect flavour or dough performance, and may require changes to processing and packaging.
6) Gelatine – the animal ingredient under siege
Few ingredients are as versatile as gelatine. It gives gummy sweets their bite, sets desserts and creates textures that alternatives struggle to match.
Yet gelatine is becoming an awkward ingredient for European food manufacturers. Derived from animal collagen, it does not fit easily with the growing market for vegan and plant-based products. Besides, its animal origin can also create halal, kosher and consumer-positioning considerations – something that food manufacturers have to increasingly take into account.
Pectin, agar, starches and other hydrocolloids can reproduce some of gelatine’s functions, but none is a straightforward drop-in replacement. These options can alter texture, processing conditions, flavour release and shelf life.
From a clean-label standpoint, the situation is a bit paradoxical. Consumers want simpler, more natural labels, but some gelatine alternatives can actually mean more ingredients.
7) DATEM – effective, familiar and increasingly unwanted
Few consumers have heard of DATEM – diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides, or E472e – but industrial bakers know exactly why they use it. The emulsifier is particularly effective at strengthening dough, improving gas retention and giving packaged bread the necessary volume and texture.
Its technical performance, however, is increasingly competing with its rather ugly name, which sounds more like a chemistry experiment than something consumers want on their plate.
The challenge is that replacing it is not simply a matter of finding another emulsifier. Bakers may turn to lecithin, enzymes, ascorbic acid or other dough-conditioning systems, often combining several ingredients.
But the transition comes at a certain price. Because dough chemistry is sensitive, changing the emulsifier can affect everything from loaf volume to crumb structure and processing. That can mean more complicated formulations and potentially higher costs.
Still, working alternatives already exist. Lallemand, a Canadian biotechnology company, for example, has demonstrated that its enzyme system can replace 0.3% DATEM in wholewheat bread while maintaining loaf volume, oven spring and dough machinability.
