Baking&Snack - February 2011 - 65

NICHE FORMULATING

Five

The

Gluten-free, low-carb, no-sugar — many new niche products target specific consumer needs and wants. Here’s what the formulator must do to ensure success.

ESSENTIALS
Flavors developed to mask off-tastes offer one option, but a number of more conventional ingredient choices also work. Ms. Ichwan’s solution to the flavor challenges of the nonwheat flours in the company’s gluten-free line was to select flavors that skewed away from the norm. Arico’s bar-style cookies come in Almond Cranberry, Lemon Ginger and Triple Berry flavors, among others. Another tactic involved cocoa. Not only is cocoa a popular flavor with consumers, but it also masks other, less-desirable flavors. “When we made our double chocolate cookie, which uses cocoa powder, we had more leeway in grain choice,” she observed. TEXTURE. To consumers, texture weighs in as important as taste. Wheat- and dairy-free foods require a flour replacement that yields the proper texture, according to Ms. Ichwan. “Alternate flours such as teff, quinoa or bean may not have the same structuring function as wheat’s gluten,” she observed. And when using whole-grain rice flour, there’s the matter of the brown specks from the bran. Texture and appearance rank high in determining consumer acceptance, according to Yadunandan Dar, PhD, applications technology manager, National Starch Food Innovation, Bridgewater, NJ. “When presented with a version of something, people automatically compare it to the original,” he said. “They tend to want the ‘free from’ version to be as close in texture to the original [as possible]. An alternative is to launch a completely different product, something not related to a conventional product, and then texture becomes a nonissue.” Resolving texture problems requires ingredients that mimic the functionality of the material being replaced. Providing discipline to the process, Dr. Dar indicated four crucial steps that the product developer must take. First is to objectively measure the texture of the original product. Second is to identify the best functional replacement

BY LAURIE GORTON onsumers faced with medical diets can find them hard to follow. The foods don’t taste right. Their textures differ from conventional products. They lack variety. They may even be poorly balanced nutritionally. These problems commonly affect processed foods developed to help susceptible individuals cope with diabetes or celiac disease, to reduce sodium or fat intake, to avoid food allergens, and to otherwise combat or correct a medical condition. The same drawbacks impinge on foods selected for lifestyle reasons — to lose weight, to follow vegan/vegetarian diets, to avoid food additives, to eat organic or even to enhance mood or boost beauty. People may be willing to try specially formulated niche products, but will the foods live up to expectations? With today’s intense consumer interest in such choices, how can a formulator ensure the repeat purchases that make a brand successful? The past two decades, dominated by health and wellness trends, provide plenty of practical experience. Challenges exist, but so do solutions. Winning in this arena requires the five essentials: taste, texture, authenticity, nutrition and economics.

TASTE. First of all, food must taste good — that was the big lesson learned during the low-fat/no-fat craze of the 1980s and reinforced in the 1990s by the low-carb fad. The plain truth is that many ingredients that make functional claims don’t taste very good. Specially formulated products using them certainly don’t taste like the original, conventional food. For example, wheat-free foods require a replacement for flour, but as Angela Ichwan, CEO of Arico Natural Foods, Beaverton, OR, observed, nonwheat flours have their own flavors, and they’re not that of wheat. “The challenge is that by using a different flour, you may have created another flavor, an unexpected flavor,” she said. “As consumers, we tend to take wheat flour as our baseline. To those accustomed to wheat flour’s flavor, other flours may taste funny.”

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February 2011 / BAKING & SNACK

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Baking&Snack - February 2011

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