Ingredients manufacturers want to make sure they reap the benefit of growing consumer enthusiasm for food with health benefits. There is a shift towards branding specific ingredients which consumers will recognise across different products – but will consumers buy it? Dr Michael Heasman and Julian Mellentin are sceptical that time-poor consumers will find time or care enough to learn what different ingredient brands do.
“We want to create a ‘NutraSweet‘ or an ‘Intel Inside‘ concept….” That is one of the most often-heard ambitions of food companies involved in the business of creating new ingredients with health benefits.
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Creating specific ingredients brands is perceived as a way of differentiating ingredients and the products they contain and of emphasizing the benefits of a particular active ingredient. The strategy, it is hoped, will lead to growing consumer recognition, which will in turn result in consumers choosing a product with a branded ingredient over a rival one which does not have the ingredient.
The most recent example of this is the decision of Altus Foods to carry the “NovaCalcium” brand on its Women’s Individual Nutrition (W.I.N.) range, currently under testmarket in the US.
NovaCalcium – which relates to a special formulation of calcium with claimed higher bio-availability – is one of three ingredient brands owned by Novartis, the partner, with Quaker, in the Altus joint venture. A second brand, NovaCol relates to a combination of soy proteins and oat beta-glucan which is claimed can lower LDL cholesterol. A third, NovaDigest, is the brand for prebiotic fibers said to aid digestive health.
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By GlobalDataWhen Novartis launched its ill-fated Aviva range, all of the Aviva products carried one of these ingredient brands – NovaCalcium, NovaCol or NovaDigest, depending on which health condition they were aimed at. Novartis’ idea stated at the time – was to build consumer awareness of these ingredient brands and then licence them to third parties to include in their own products.
That NovaCalcium has re-surfaced in W.I.N. shows that Novartis obviously hasn’t given up on the idea. In fact, the company has added yet another ingredient brand to its portfolio: it is the worldwide licensee for Reducol, a plant sterol which can lower LDL cholesterol. Right now Novartis is busy trying to get the Reducol brand into products in Australia and it has ambitions in other markets.
In fact, everyone wants their own branded ingredient. Here are just a handful of examples:
- LGG, a probiotic marketed by Finland’s Valio
- Reuteri, a probiotic marketed by Chr. Hansen
- Beneo, a prebiotic marketed by Orafti
- NovaSoy, a cholesterol-lowering soy ingredient belonging to ADM
- Supro, a GMO-free cholesterol-lowering soy ingredient belonging to Protein Technologies (PTI), part of DuPont
- Abacor, a cholesterol-lowering soy ingredient marketed by Nutripharma
- Benecol, Raisio‘s famous cholesterol-lowering plant stanol ester
- Diminicol, a new cholesterol-lowering plant sterol from Finland’s Teriaka
- Reducol, a cholesterol-lowering plant sterol from Forbes Medi-Tech
And this is just the tip of the iceberg – there are many, many more in the pipeline, ranging from two rival brands of pine bark extract – Pycnogenol and Enzogenol currently in supplements but whose owners plan to move into foods to many types of soy ingredients.
Raising consumer awareness?
While these brands all have brave intentions, none of them, we would guess, will get anywhere near the level of consumer awareness of NutraSweet or Intel. The latter spends tens upon tens of millions of dollars each year on mass-media advertising to raise consumer awareness. Intel has become synonymous with a certain level of technical quality. That awareness creates consumer pull – the Holy Grail which the food ingredients branders seek.
NutraSweet in its hey day also spent tens upon tens of millions each year on successfully building its brand. In fact it should be remembered that despite the ambitions of the food industry for building ingredient brands only NutraSweet was ever really successful. How many of the branded ingredient wannabes have the resources to do the same? Probably, none.
Brand owners will no doubt say that they will use PR or the excellence of their science to build brand awareness. Such an approach may indeed get some brand awareness, but it will be very limited and will never approach the level achieved by NutraSweet. It should also be remembered that NutraSweet were also experts in successfully exploiting PR opportunities and their science base – and many present day companies could still learn lots from these past lessons.
There’s another question. Consumers are, we are told, increasingly cash-rich and time-poor. Demand for convenience foods is rising as people struggle to cope with ever-busier schedules. Indeed even products with health benefits will need to be convenience products if they are to succeed. In these people’s busy lives how are they going to find the time (or care enough) to learn what all these ingredients are – and the more branded ingredients, the more work a consumer has to do? The onpack brands will easily be lost amid the clutter on the label.
Ingredients branding strategies are about selling science. They are about science push, not consumer pull and, as we say time after time, people buy food, not science.
To find out more about Michael Heasman and Julian Mellentin’s book The Functional Foods Revolution: Healthy People, Healthy Profits? please click here.
To view related research reports, please follow the links below:- Functional Foods: A World Survey Getting to the Heart of the Matter – The Market for Heart Benefit Foods |
