Whether you are a retail store, manufacturer, ingredient supplier, or a foodservice operator looking to capitalize on the next food or beverage trend, having relevant data allows you to make better decisions that affect your bottom line.

Prepared Foods gets the inside scoop on foodservice new product development in an interview with Michael S. Zeller, Senior Corporate Executive Chef, R&D, at Simplot Food Group.

Dr. Zhong is an expert specializing in various food ingredient categories such as fats and oils, emulsifiers, antioxidants, preservatives, alternative proteins, hydrocolloids, enzymes, and more. She has served in technical leadership roles and has made great achievements in the food industry. 

Prior to joining IDQ, Friedrich spent more than 20 years at Cargill where she held roles in research; development; innovation of proteins, snacks, beverages, confectionary and bread products; ingredient chemistry; nutrition; and food safety research.

Amid signs of progress after a few challenging years for the food and beverage supply chain, brands are planning to dial up product innovation efforts to meet consumer demand (42%), combat rising costs (46%), and stay competitive (51%).

Established in 2003 by Prepared Foods, these awards have recognized landmark food and beverage product launches.

Food industry professionals, CPG product developers and culinary connoisseurs can now benefit from a free educational series that guides participants through the entire lifecycle of flavor development – all led by world-class flavor experts.

Although plant-based has become a popular term in the dairy- and meat-free categories, it does not accurately describe all developments in this fast-moving field. There are technologies that generate “animal-free,” bioidentical ingredients such as dairy whey and dairy casein. Even so, “plant-based” continues to grow in use, with indexed average annual growth of +42% between 2017 and 2022.

Columbus Vegetable Oils, a supplier of high-quality oils, shortenings, sauces and dressings, announced the hire of Jenn Farrell as director of research & development and quality. 

The past decade has seen the rise of natural, botanical sweeteners of all types and abilities flooding the market. These plant-derived sweeteners range from zero-calorie HIS products such as stevia and monkfruit to monosaccharides like unrefined plant sugars which offer only a slight reduction in calories but bring other advantages to the table. The challenge for product formulators is to meet the demand for products with less sugar but make them as indistinguishable as possible from their full-sugar counterparts.