Healthy living & lifestyle
specific health or nutritional content claims they want to make. We need to meet those requirements before the product can be presented to the customer,” she adds. Then there’s the regulatory part of the picture, where Karnik’s team comes in. “If it’s a brand-new ingredient, you have to convince regulators of safety and efficacy and that it’s worth putting it out there as a novel food,” she says. “That is a multi-year and – quite rightly – a highly scrutinised process. Consumers can take comfort in knowing that if it’s been approved by regulators in a certain market, it’s gone through serious scrutiny.”
Are regulations keeping up? While compliance poses a challenge for ingredient companies, it’s a two-way street. Regulators are also struggling to keep pace with the rapid development of new ingredients and formulation methods, such as precision fermentation, a biotechnological process where microorganisms are engineered to produce specific proteins or compounds. “With all of this new technology development, regulators have to think about how they are going to test and evolve their frameworks and assessment processes to assess safety and efficacy,” Karnik notes. “The technology needs to be developed and established first before regulators can catch up.”
For ingredients companies like Tate & Lyle, the focus is on keeping communications channels with regulators open. And that dialogue is helping. “[Regulators] are much quicker to react to technology development, although of course there is a huge discrepancy between regions like Europe and America and emerging markets,” Karnik says. According to food science consultant Bryan Quoc Le, however, some ingredients and formulations do fall through the net. “I think one of the big blind spots right [in the US] now, which needs more attention, is the legalisation of cannabis products. Unfortunately, there are a lot of loopholes, and different states are trying to close them. But there are still several aspects that remain unclear,” he explains. For example, say a product claims to contain hemp extract. Technically, if you concentrate the hemp extract, you can derive THC and other cannabinoids from it. But companies don’t necessarily have to disclose that. This allows them to include the extract in beverages, for instance, without explicitly stating that it contains THC. “This creates a kind of grey market. It’s a disservice to many businesses because, at some point, those loopholes will be closed. Right now, it’s almost like a gold rush. Companies are making bioactive products
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com What are food enzymes and what are they used for?
Enzymes are naturally occurring proteins that enhance biochemical reactions. They can be obtained by extraction from plants or animals or by fermentation from micro- organisms. They are normally added to perform a technological function in the manufacture, processing, preparation and treatment of a wide range of foods.
Food enzymes (FE) are mainly used in the baking industry, for manufacturing fruit juices, in wine making and brewing as well as in cheese manufacturing. An important field of application in terms of volumes is starch conversion to yield ingredients for foodstuff. In food production, food enzymes have a couple of advantages: ■ They can be used as alternatives to traditional chemical-based technology and can replace synthetic chemicals in many processes. Such uses can improve the environmental performance of production processes, through lower energy consumption and biodegradability.
■ They are more specific in their action than synthetic chemicals. Therefore, processes that utilise enzymes have fewer side reactions and waste by-products, resulting in higher-quality purified products.
Source: European Commission
with psychological effects, but all they have to claim is that they contain hemp extract. “That’s a regulation that really needs to be updated. If consumers don’t fully understand it, they could be harmed or affected. It’s a big issue, because people might take these ingredients thinking they’re safe or functional, but that’s not always the case,” he says.
The future is personalised For both Chen and Karnik, the next big thing to watch out for in the functional ingredient sphere is personalised nutrition – both from a technological and ingredient perspective. At TasteWise, Chen is working on refining their platform to get food to the personalisation era. “From the messaging to the product, we want to essentially redefine the way food and beverage companies create products and the relationship between the consumers and the product,” he notes.
From an ingredient perspective, Karnik is most excited about looking at functional ingredients that address the needs of a group of individuals or a certain type of genetic make-up. “That trend is really knocking on our door,” she says. “Last year, we did a piece of work on what personalised nutrition would mean for a company like ours, where we don’t sell directly to consumers. We explored consumer segmentation and found it fascinating to look at personalisation almost like a ‘dress size’ approach — not prescribing diets based on genetic material, but offering cost-effective, but still impactful personalisation. There’s a whole area to explore based on consumer characteristics, whether by age, health goals, race or even genetic make-up.” As we move into the future, the intersection of technology, science and consumer demand will continue to shape how we approach food – not just as sustenance, but as a personalised tool for health and wellness, with functional ingredients playing a pivotal role in addressing individual health needs and goals. ●
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