Archive for the ‘New Product Development’ Category

Interesting article about fiber….

http://www.foodbusinessnews.net/news/newsfinder.asp? &Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=2414&docId=l:1055514154&topicId=100011229&start=16&topics=single

Copyright 2009 Sentinel Communications Co.
Orlando Sentinel (Florida)
October 13, 2009 Tuesday
FINAL
HEALTH & FITNESS; FLORIDA; Pg. D1

Fiber, fiber everywhere
Does fortification craze meet your nutrition needs?

 

Janet Helm, Special to Tribune Newspapers

 

Your mother called it roughage, and prunes were once the poster child. Now fiber holds the coveted spot as the new "it" ingredient.

Throughout the years, fiber has fallen in and out of favor. (Remember the oat bran craze of the late ’80s?) Today it’s back on top and popping up in some unexpected places — ranging from yogurt, cottage cheese and ice cream to cookies, toaster pastries and snack bars.

You can even drink your fiber. No, we’re not talking about Metamucil, or other laxatives — which, by the way, have been transformed into "fiber supplements." Now you can buy fiber-fortified juices, powdered drink mixes and bottled waters, or sprinkle packets of Splenda with fiber in your coffee.

"Fiber has emerged as a functional food favorite," said Tom Vierhile, director of Datamonitor’s Product Launch Analytics. The New York-based market research firm reports that 7 percent of all new food products introduced in 2009 had a "high fiber" claim. (Functional foods, or products that provide a specific health benefit, typically rely on some type of fortification.)

A true indication of the power of this trend is the rise of fiber-based brands, or products whose entire value proposition relies on fiber, according to Krista Faron, a senior analyst at Mintel, the market research firm. She cites General Mills Fiber One — a brand that started with cereal but has branched into an entire family of products that range far beyond the breakfast aisle.

The Fiber One promise is, "Cardboard no, delicious yes."

This modern approach to fiber is a far cry from a bowl of bran. The new high-fiber foods are spiked with isolated fibers — a type of purified powder that differs from the intact fiber that is naturally found in whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

These so-called functional fibers, often inulin and polydextrose (see accompanying story), do not have a grainy or gummy texture, so they allow manufacturers to add fiber into creamy yogurts, clear drinks and other previously fiber-free places. This type of fiber fortification is often behind the claim "35% Daily Value of Fiber" or "Double the Fiber" that is showing up on the front of package labels.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but these fibers are different from those that are naturally occurring, said Joanne Slavin, a University of Minnesota researcher and one of the country’s leading experts on dietary fiber.

Studies continue to document the numerous health benefits of eating a high-fiber diet, but the evidence on these isolated fibers is much skimpier.

"This concept might make sense, but it’s less researched," said Slavin. "It’s an up and coming area."

For example, some studies do suggest that inulin may help boost the beneficial bacteria in our digestive tract, but there is little or no evidence that this type of fiber helps lower cholesterol or aids regularity.

Additionally, the obesity-related research is linked to people eating high-fiber, lower calorie foods like fruits and vegetables. The weight loss benefits would not likely apply if you loaded up on high-fiber, calorie-dense foods such as chocolate-granola snack bars and ice cream.

Even so, Slavin said these isolated fibers may help make it easier for people to get more fiber. Most of us only get about half the fiber we need. (Current recommendations are 25 to 38 grams of fiber per day.)

"There are a lot more choices to get fiber, and that’s the upside," she said. "If fiber doesn’t taste good, people won’t eat it."

Still, she worries that these new fiber-fortified products may give people an "out." She doesn’t want people to think "I’m off the hook" just because they snacked on a cookie or snack bar spiked with fiber.

"We have to keep the [spotlight] on whole grains, fruits and vegetables," she said. These foods naturally contain fiber along with other health-promoting nutrients. If you eat three fiber-fortified chocolate bars, you can meet your fiber goal, but it’s not the same as if you ate an abundance of foods that naturally contain fiber.

It’s also a lot easier to overdo it on fiber with the sudden onslaught of fortification, Slavin said. Your health may not be in danger, but you could pay for it in digestive discomfort.

Despite the differences between isolated and intact fiber, they all look the same on a nutrition label (grams of fiber per serving). You’ll need to check the ingredient list to know the source of fiber.

Bottom line, all fiber is not created equal, and a mixture is best. Plus, there may be benefits of getting a bulk of your fiber the old-fashioned way.

Know your fiber

Soluble fiber: Naturally found in oats, barley and beans. Helps lower blood cholesterol, which may reduce the risk of heart disease. May help manage blood sugar levels to lower diabetes risk.

Insoluble fiber: Naturally found in whole grains, bran, seeds, nuts, vegetables and fruits. Helps aid regularity and may reduce the risk of colon cancer.

Functional fibers: Isolated or extracted chemically from various plant sources. Ingredients include inulin, polydextrose, resistant maltodextrin, oligosaccharides and cellulose.

Prebiotics: A type of fiber that feeds probiotics, the good bacteria in your digestive tract. Primary source is inulin (from chicory root or Jerusalem artichoke).
CONTACT: ctc-goodeating@tribune.com

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Big challenge – and need to address and fix it [at KIND and PeaceWorks we are working on several initiatives to make fruits & veggies more convenient without detracting from minimally processed, attractive natural wholesome essence]

Kids Eat Few Fruits, Veggies

WSJ Associated Press

Fewer than 10% of U.S. high-school students are eating the combined recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables, a finding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called "poor" in a report.

The report, based on 2007 data, found that 13% of U.S. high-school students get at least three servings of vegetables a day and just 32% get two servings of fruit. Fewer than one in 10 get enough of both combined.

[Read more →]

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Time Magazine wrote a very compelling piece about "The High Price of Cheap Food." It should be required reading, as should the movie Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s books, which presumably inspired this article.

[Read more →]

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here is a cool story about a Ugandan coffee cooperative of Muslims, Christians and Jews working side by side to make quality coffee.  Very similar to the PeaceWorks model we introduced 15 years ago.  But so cool to see the initiative coming from the African community.

The company that imports and markets the product, Thanksgiving Coffee Company, seems very sincerely motivated and professional.  And an NGO named Kulanu apparently catalyzed this venture.  Nice job!

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Matthew Crawford wrote a really interesting article, The Case For Working with Your Hands, in The New York Times Magazine, about the overlooked intellectual rigor required when making physical things.

It could not come at a better time, as we are becoming more virtual, digital, commodified, and dissociated from nature – and from the simplicity of tangible output. Whether it is the Internet, financial derivatives, chicken mcnuggets or "nutrition" bars made with stuff you can’t decipher or pronounce, society is on a trajectory to twist and pretend away from simple realness.

KIND, by the way, is a counter-cultural effort to reconnect with the goodness of real, authentic, transparent wholesome natural unadulterated ingredients you can see and pronounce.  The philosophy underlying everything we do is to stick to authenticity: a) avoid pretentious wannabe names that betray the reality of the products we make with allegorical cute titles; b) avoid fillers; c) avoid artificial ingredients and artificial sweeteners; d) avoid overprocessing and emulsification; and just in general stick to wholesome ingredients you can see and pronounce.™

[Read more →]

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I remember this brand from when I lived a summer in Japan.  They have a drink named "Pocari Sweat" and it is a best seller.  Sweat?!  Apparently in Japan, perspiration is associated with rejuvenating freshness.  Now here is a line extension for Pocari Sweat in powder form.  Mmmm.

IMG_0485

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The holy grail for environmentally conscious manufacturers and consumers is truly bio-degradable effective packaging.  While the biggest threat is in plastic bottles and packaging materials that overwhelm our landfills, even small wrappers add up.

The challenge to manufacturers is that the very things that make wrappers good – impermeability, sealing out oxygen to prevent oxidation and decomposition – are also what makes the wrappers hard to decompose.  And if you try to use corn-based bio-degradable wrappers, exposure to moisture can make the wrapper protection degrade and be ineffective.  At KIND we keep looking for solutions that could enable us to use bio-degradable wrappers but have yet to find the answer (if anyone has any technology or ideas, please let me know).

Frito-Lay just announced that the outer layer of its Sun Chips will use compostable packaging.  That is nice, but what is really interesting is their commitment that within 1 year, they aim to also use compostable packaging for the bags’ interior.  If they really achieve it, that will be a remarkable step.

[Read more →]

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Often in life I am sure you wonder if you had met a person before. Have our lives crossed paths before a more recent episode? When was the first time we met? Where we together in a particular place – whether at school, or at a conference, or talk, or during our childhoods? Could you even rewind a part of your brain and see what you said to that person when you first met them? I daydreamed about a sci-fi future where the “grid” could keep all your information about every place you’ve been, and what your thoughts and experiences and interactions were like.

Then I realized that a lot of this could already be done rather easily NOW.

All you need is a GPS mapping device with a time-mapping database. Your iphone or blackberry could have an application that every 5 minutes or every hour or every day (depending on your preferred settings and subscription/storage capacity) could store your GPS location at that particular time.

Three or thirty years later, you could wonder openly with your date, or an employee or a colleague if you had met before, or where your lives had intersected before, and you’d just sync your databases to find the crossing points, if any, that exist. You could make some pieces private or public, open or closed. But you’d have the ability to trace back steps at important points, quite simply.

At a formative moment, you could even connect a blog journal or video entry to your geo-time-map.

This would not only be fun and functional, but also existentially transformative.

We always are “surprised” at how small this world is, and how enormous a coincidence it is that you find a friend in a far away random place.

In fact, I have always thought that the laws of numbers make these encounters quite probable, and most likely there are many more opportunities for interactions among people you know, whose paths you cross by milliseconds without knowing it. If you could look at your grid and compare it with a friend’s, or with all your universe of friends, how many amazing “coincidences” wouldn’t you find – when you opted to?

Perhaps Doppler or GoogleMaps or Facebook or a new web/business platform you have could take advantage of this idea.

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Only one food product was selected from among thousands at the Natural Products Expo East in Boston last weekend as the Best Product of the Year: PeaceWorks’ KIND PLUS Mango Macadamia nutritional bar.

Here is a report from Gourmet Retailer:

The Mango Macadamia flavor of KIND Plus – the first new line of products since the launch of PeaceWorks’ original KIND Fruit + Nut Bars – was singled out at the massive tradeshow’s New Product Showcase as the best new food item. Introducing six new distinctive flavors like Cranberry & Almond, Almond & Cashew, and Passion Fruit Macadamia, KIND Plus brings enhanced nutrition to the delicious taste consumers have come to expect from KIND by adding targeted supplements like calcium, antioxidants, protein, and Omega-3.  Learn more about KIND by visiting www.kindsnacks.com.

The Gourmet Retailer

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In fifteen years since founding PeaceWorks I’ve never seen a line get such swift wide acceptance.

KIND PLUS is gaining such traction because it’s the only line in the functional and nutritional bar category made of all wholesome ingredients you can see and pronounce.(TM) 

What does this mean?  All other lines in the category are "slab bars" – made of emulsions of hodge-podges of blends of undetectable ingredients.  Why? Well, it’s much less expensive and easier to make a bar from emulsions – from date paste (in the more noble cases) down to chemical compounds and artificial ingredients like high fructose corn syrup. But you lose integrity, nutritional value, texture and taste.

It seems deceptively simple to provide functional properties – like Omega-3, Anti-Oxidants, Protein, B-Complex, or Calcium – in a bar made of all natural fruits and nuts, without adulteration or emulsion.  But it was a challenging effort.  After several years of development, we achieved it.

You can learn more about KIND PLUS here.

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