21 Jan 2015 What’s hot in beverage formulation?
“When you’re talking about ready-to-drink, single-serve beverages that you grab in a convenience store, people are much more adventurous,” says Randy Kreienbrink, a certified food scientist at botanical ingredients specialist BI Nutraceuticals .
“They maybe wouldn’t go to the supplements aisle and buy blue-green algae, but they will try it in a green juice or smoothie. The beverage category is one of the more progressive areas of the industry along with healthy snacks, it’s really at the forefront of innovation in terms of unique ingredients and trends.”
Wanda Jurlina, technical service manager at gums and hydrocolloids expert CP Kelco , adds: “It’s not just new ingredients; we’ve seen completely new categories emerging in the beverage sector in the last few years. It’s incredibly dynamic.”
Protein-enriched drinks; ready-to-drink coffee; and dairy-alternatives
So what’s trending right now?
Protein-enriched drinks (whey, pea, rice, hemp, soy); ready-to-drink coffees and new ‘cold-brew’ coffees (some of which also use nut milks, and dairy-alternatives (almond, cashew, soy, rice, coconut) are particularly hot areas for CP Kelco, says Jurlina.
“A few years ago, you wouldn’t see hydrocolloids in many beverages except carrageenan in low-fat chocolate milk. But now you are seeing them in everything from diet carbonated soft drinks to juice-based drinks, where hydrocolloids can build back the body you get with a full-sugar soda or 100% juice.”
Dairy alternatives such as nut-milk-based beverages present particular challenges for formulators, as nut particulates need suspending (along with calcium and protein powders that are often added to nut milks to boost their nutritional profile), and because they can be thin and watery, says Jurlina.
“A lot of companies are using gellan gum [a water-soluble polysaccharide produced by microbial fermentation] to suspend ingredients in dairy alternatives so you don’t get sediment at the bottom, and then adding locust bean gum, xanthan gum or cellulose gum to get a fuller bodied mouthfeel.”
“With some of these nut milks, the particulates are never going to dissolve, so the most you can do is grind them to a fine paste and find a way to get them to uniformly disperse and stay suspended in the beverage, and gellan gum can do that really well.
“The same applies to calcium. If you use the soluble variety, it won’t be stable through all the processing, but if you use insoluble tricalcium phosphate or calcium carbonate, you get all these dense particulates that settle on the bottom of the bottle; gellan gum keeps them suspended in the beverage.”
Carrageenan: R&D people love it, but marketers have issues
An advantage of carrageenan, a popular – but much-maligned – ingredient derived from seaweed, is that it can perform both functions simulataneously: suspending ingredients, and adding mouthfeel, says Jurlina.
“Gellan gum is great at suspending insoluble ingredients, but it doesn’t add viscosity; carrageenan will do both, and is incredibly cost-effective as you can use it in very small amounts.
“However, some customers don’t want to use carrageenan, and we have to explain to them that they will probably have to replace it with two ingredients instead of one, and it’s going to cost them more.”
She adds: “The R&D people in the companies we deal with all know that there is no issue with carrageenan (click HERE ) but the marketers sometimes come to a decision that they don’t want to deal with it (click HERE ).”….