“What do customers expect?”: this is the challenge – rather than the question – faced by the food industry with a view to achieving the right balance between new trends and more traditional tastes. In the confectionery industry, as elsewhere, this effort is going to produce some remarkable results.
Here stress should be laid on L’Italiana Aromi’s predisposition for natural food. We combine our know-how and expertise with ongoing research and the development of new applications, to provide our customers with really ground-breaking ideas. Let us give you a few examples: from the brewed tea, a leader product in the beverage sector, the idea was born to combine it with natural flavours and other extracts to create new black, white and green tea candies. In the same way, grapefruit flavour has been added to aromatic herb blends to give our digestive candies a surprising taste.
We rely on our ultracentennial knowledge of extraction to produce extracts suiting traditional digestive and soothing, refreshing herbal candies. For millennials, we have created Prosecco and mojito flavoured candies. Finally, tradition lovers and chocolate addicts will appreciate our distillates and extracts for timeless coffee, rum and limoncello filled chocolates (also available with non-alcoholic fillings).
Tastes change under the influence of fashion, culture, tradition and as the result of bold combinations of flavours. However, never before have consumers around the world placed so much emphasis on good, healthy, pampering products. This is one of the reasons why the concepts “Wellness”, “Nature” and “Tradition” as approached in a different way can now also be applied to candies, sweets, chocolate and chocolates, thereby encouraging consumers to try products with ingredients that are as natural as possible.
To make healthy products with excellent taste, the food industry has ingredients of natural origin available. For several years these have been connected with a remarkable growth potential for the food & beverage sector. For example, herb, flower and fruit extracts and infusions can be used to produce better-for-you candies. Data on consumption clearly suggests that products containing natural extracts and flavours have long proved tremendously successful, consumption being steadily on the increase across Europe as worldwide.
This favourable trend has also been shown in 2018, the use of natural ingredients having translated into both new products and revisited classics, with different consistencies and tastes. Chocolate was, and still is, consumers’ favourite. Launching new products which are unusual in some ways has not affected its popularity among our customers, who can now choose from countless options: from matcha tea chocolate – rich in antioxidants and mineral salts – to new pink chocolate with an after flavour of red berry fruits, and vegan chocolate, its consumption having grown by a record 47% over the last 5 years.