GLAZING, COATING & POLISHING CAPOL has also witnessed a rise in consumer demand for
vegan products across many countries around the world. “This strong trend also extends to vegan glazing and sealing agents in the confectionery industry,” says Thomas. To this end, CAPOL has been busy helping to reformulate recipes to create vegan products, in collaboration with its confectionery manufacturer customers. “We have seen a growing demand for vegan confectionery product options that continue to meet the popular tastes of various generations and regions around the world,” continues Thomas. “This trend has been moving quickly and it has been interesting to see how it has reached from chocolate panned products into other confectionery segments – there is, for example, also a growing call for vegan options in the gummies and jellies segment.”
While understanding that confectionery will never be considered a healthy food choice, consumers do continue to seek out brands that can help guide their product choices – even indulgent ones. “The implementation of high fat, sugar and salt regulation and the restrictions being put in place by governments further highlight the importance of making healthier options a new product development priority for confectioners,” adds Paul. Sue Allis, Group Technical Lead at Thew Arnott, takes up
the story: “Confectionery producers see that the finishing options can offer a great opportunity to make their products stand out from the crowd – giving them distinguishing visual characteristics. To help ensure that the task of distinguishing a product does not detract from the ability to also have a clean label, a variety of sugar-free and ‘vegan’ glazes are now available. “The use of natural colours in confectionery is a growing
“Every step of the confectionery manufacturing process must work towards the creation of a finished product that complies to key market developments”
Yet another trend is for product variation and innovation
to help brands stand out from the crowd. Product variation is often added at the finishing stage. CAPOL has addressed this need by combining one of its existing chocolate glazing agents with a new range of natural colours which only requires the confectioner to produce one basic type of dragée in one pan and these can be used as the base product for multi-coloured finished products. “Think of white chocolate or compound coated hazelnuts for example,” says Thomas. “By adding a glazing agent with vivid natural colours interesting colouring effects can be achieved.” In a traditional process, confectioners would add several layers of coloured chocolate or compound to cover the basic chocolate coating before the glazing agent can be applied. They would need to do this for every different colouring which they wanted to achieve. Using CAPOL’s new approach, however, Thomas explained that it is possible to create wide product variety at the same time as reducing process and production times. This can be achieved because the colouring and glazing of the dragée centres occur in just three quick glazing steps – skipping the separate colouring processes and layers altogether, while helping to achieve a dynamic ‘flame’ look on the finished product.
Healthy alternatives
Paul Jupp, Commercial Director at Thew Arnott, highlighted the need for the confectionery sector to be able to offer more healthy confectionery alternatives. “Consumers are seeking a greater array of products that have healthier options, or which can be easily identified as being ‘clean label’, without artificial additives and/or vegan,” he says.
42 Kennedy’s Confection May 2022
trend, to help ensure a clean label product. This can require the use of special polishes and glazes to help protect these more ‘unstable’ colours,” continues Sue. Because consumers often make purchasing decisions with
their eyes, visual appearance is critical, so confectioners cannot cut corners when it comes to the aesthetics of their product offerings. Today there is a coating solution to meet most aspirations – metallic or pearlised coatings, for example, can provide an eye-catching iridescent finish to confectionery. Also touching on the supply chain problems facing many manufacturers today, Thornsten Bornholdt, Marketing Manager at Thew Arnott, says: “Today, suppliers such as ourselves need to be working more closely than ever with their confectionery customers to ensure that any short-term issues, relating to the sourcing of raw materials, will not affect the ability to supply effective solutions for glazing, polishing and coating. To this end we are working very hard to offer creative solutions that can replace certain oils and fats that are currently in short supply. These solutions need to be able to deliver similar functionality and stability to, for example, high oleic sunflower oil and mid chain triglycerides, which are currently proving difficult to source.”
Automation benefits
Julien Mouron, Sales Engineer at Dumoulin, a coating equipment supplier to the confectionery sector, also highlighted the need for greater versatility in the production process to counter the challenges mentioned earlier. He says: “Confectionery producers are having to address more and more specific consumer demands such as fairtrade ingredients, organic, vegan, kosher and halal. Increasingly they need to be able to shift quickly from one to another, from batch to batch, to ensure they can offer the wider range of product options that consumers are demanding. Another strong trend – if not a new one – is the quest for novelty, which may start with new ingredients but also requires new technologies to use and combine them to create ever more exciting and innovative products.” Confectioners need more versatile coating equipment solutions that are able to handle the ever-wider range of ingredients used today. Hygienic design also continues to be
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