As consumers have begun thinking of food as a vehicle for achieving specific health goals, the emphasis of food ingredients has changed. Ingredients that fortify (herbals, vitamins and minerals) and ingredients that reduce (low calorie sweeteners, low-carbohydrate polyols) have become important parts of the product development process, crucial to creating foods that are healthful and popular. Researching the levels and patterns of ingredient use in new products is a unique way to understand where the food industry is heading.
Unlike the standard Mintel report, which focuses on the end-consumer market, this report deals with an intermediate market level--where ingredients are sold to food manufacturers in an industrial wholesale process. Consumers affect intermediate markets only to the extent that their demands drive the number of products in which featured ingredients appear. The incidence of usage of many ingredients is examined in this report, via Mintels Global New Products Database. A host of other factors that impact the markets for these ingredients are also analyzed, such as innovation within the ingredients market, regulation, and global competition.
The report covers trends in the usage of specific ingredients within the following broad categories:
- low-calorie sweeteners
- vitamin and mineral enrichment
- other functional ingredients
- herbal ingredients
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