WHAT’S NEXT IN INGREDIENTS?

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THE ELEGANCE OF EXPELLER PRESSED

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ENHANCING ANTIOXIDANTS: SWEET POTATO INGREDIENTS

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A CLOSER LOOK AT HEALTHY,

INNOVATIVE INGREDIENTS

FOOD & BEVER AGE • CONCEPT TO DELIVERY • PRESENT TO FUTURE • FOODPROCESSING.COM

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Whether replacing traditional ingredients, clean-ing up a label or eliminating genetically modi-fied organisms emerging ingredients — and a few

ancient products we haven’t seen in food for quite some time — are satisfying the need for healthier foods and beverages.

Food processors are testing and commercializing items fea-turing plant-based proteins such as microalgae, ancient grains, turmeric, new non-sugar sweeteners, various seeds and func-tional probiotics.

Sweet potatoes, recently labeled a superfood by its market-ers, are making inroads into breads, cereals, bars and snacks. Sweet potato ingredients are versatile and gaining popular-ity for their nutritional density and alignment with the paleo trend, says Nathan Holleman, vice president of marketing and sales at Carolina Innovative Food Ingredients (CIFI), Nash-ville, N.C. “Sweet potato ingredients can provide outstanding clean label and sensory properties. Our team has been success-ful creating applications with sensory appeal as well as compel-ling nutritional profiles.”

CIFI offers sweet potato products such as juice and dehy-drated ingredients (flour and granules), sourced and processed in North Carolina. CIFI says its ingredients boast a clean label as well as a healthy profile for applications such as nutrition bars (using dehydrated sweet potato crumbles), artificial sweet-ener replacements, condiments, sauces and desserts.

CIFI’s dehydrated sweet potato flour in particular shows promise as a component in gluten-free muffins and other quick breads, but can be used in just about any food segment to add fiber and other vitamins and minerals.

Kashi, La Jolla, Calif., recently unveiled its first sweet pota-to-containing cereal, Sweet Potato Sunshine, an organic, non-genetically modified sprouted grains delivering the orange tuber in the form of flakes, sprinkled with cinnamon and molasses.

Another brightly colored trend setter, turmeric is one of the top nine natural and organic food trends for 2015, according to the Sterling-Rice Group, Boulder, Colo. Primarily used in curry powder and a key flavor choice in Chinese foods, Indian curry dishes and good old bright-yellow mustard, turmeric is being called “a miracle spice” by some doctors.

Sterling Rice Group says turmeric and its active ingredi-ent curcumin (the natural phenol that lends that bright yellow color) are notable for their cognitive health maintenance and anti-inflammatory properties, healing abilities and support of joints and muscles.

Until recently, it was challenging to find many tasty prod-ucts featuring turmeric, but today, it’s used in beverages, rice products, soups and convenience staples. A few examples in-clude Numi Organic Tea and Healthee Organic Turmeric Brown Rice.

In April, Kraft Foods announced it would replacing artifi-cial colors or preservatives in its Original Macaroni & Cheese Boxed Dinner in the U.S., and switched to using turmeric, along with annatto and paprika, because they’re derived from natural sources.

It’s also in new products from New Attitude Beverage Corp., Redondo Beach, Calif., which markets Blue Monkey Coconut Collection coconut waters and juice drinks. This year, Blue Monkey is offering three flavors of gluten-free,

What’s Next in Ingredients? From chia and coconut, new sweeteners, protein sources and probiotics, the contents of our foods are changing. Emerging ingredients are moving into more applications, with cleaner labels, giving formulators more choices.By Lauren R. Hartman, Product Development Editor

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toasted coconut chips that are high in fiber. The chips contain ginger, espresso, chocolate, wasabi, bacon, mango, sriracha, cinnamon, matcha and turmeric. Original, ginger and wasabi flavors are packed in 1.4-oz. standup pouches available nation-ally in select markets.

Combining turmeric and the digestive benefits of probi-otics, Temple Turmeric (templeturmeric.com), a New York City-based marketer of turmeric-based beverages that support a positive inflammation response, is now rolling out two sea-sonal beverages that contain probiotics, its first probiotic of-ferings. New Holiday Spiced Lassi and Pure Fire Cider both contain turmeric as well as one billion colony-forming units of the patented spore-forming probiotic BC30 from Ganeden Inc., Mayfield Heights, Ohio.

Temple Turmeric uses a proprietary varietal of the spice – non-GMO Hawaiian Oana turmeric — as the beverages’ base ingredient. Like the rest of the company’s drinks, these bever-ages are processed and packaged using high-pressure process-ing to preserve nutrition and ingredient efficacy.

Ancient and sprouted grains take rootAncient grains have been in diets for thousands of years, and several like quinoa, flax, farro, chia and teff, have made a come-back. They’re starting to figure prominently in food trends for being whole grain, gluten-free, non-GMO, high-fiber, high-protein and vegan.

Consumers are discovering more of these nutrient-rich alternatives to conventional wheat, and are realizing the less-refined grains have notable nutritional profiles.

“Sprouted ingredients are trending, particularly flax, qui-noa and chia seed,” says Jim Breen, founder and CEO of Live Better Brands, a whole-grain snack chips and crackers com-pany in Minneapolis. “Sprouted grains, beans and seeds have seen a big rise in popularity in the last few years. Folks are more mindful about maximizing and enhancing the nutrition in the foods they eat and look for quality protein sources ... increasingly in snacking.”

In September, Breen’s company rolled out new tortilla chip flavors under its Way Better Snacks label. One version called Oh Snap! Ginger Snap, teams ginger, molasses and warm spices in a healthful chip made with sprouted flax seed, chia seed and quinoa. The company’s limited-edition holiday chips

include Oh My Sweet Punkin Cranberry with dried cranber-ries dotting each chip, sprouted flax seed and quinoa as well as a base of pumpkin. And its new “everyday flavor” rolling out in 2016 is Ginger-Kissed Sweeet Potato, which balances ginger and sweet potatoes, sprouted quinoa and flax seed. All are gluten- and GMO-free and whole grain.

“Brands are looking for ways to insert more healthful ingre-dients into their products, while keeping flavor a top priority,” Breen adds. “Sprouted ingredients not only provide increased nutrients and better nutrient absorption, but also a richer, nut-tier flavor.”

Live Better Brands also launched sprouted barley crackers in four flavors, which include Black Bean & Salsa. The new crackers feature heritage grains such as spelt and farro, and have 21g of whole grains per serving. “Farro wheat is also an on-trend grain high in protein. Spelt, one of the oldest heritage grains, has a nutty flavor,” Breen notes.

Rajen Mehta, senior director of specialty ingredients at Grain Millers, Eden Prairie, Minn., says the company’s recently devel-oped natural, functional oat fibers and its processing of flax seed have been great additions to its line of grain-based ingredients.

Aside from increasing dietary fiber for a nutrient content claim, oat fibers can increase crunchiness and crispiness of snacks and cereals, he says, and can enhance shelf life and the makeup of flatbreads while improving texture. “The func-tional flours line brings many properties of naturally modified starches to oat flours,” he says. The oat fibers and functional flours can be used in flatbreads, protein powders, bars and tra-ditional bakery products, Mehta suggests.

Spreading seeds and ‘Peace’Chia seeds could be the ultimate superfood, says fast-growing Health Warrior, Richmond, Va. The company uses chia in its portable Chia Protein snack bars in five flavors. The bars claim to have more omega-3s (1,000g) than 10 lbs. of salmon, more protein (4g) than 3 lbs. of tofu, 4g of fiber and 100 calories each. The vegan, non-GMO bars are also gluten-free.

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From FIRST SIGHT to LAST BITEThe most appealing bars and snacks offer both nutritious ingredients and

great taste. With extruded inclusions, reliably sourced veggies and grains, and non-GMO

ingredients, Bunge helps you build an exceptional treat—with a clean label.

| BungeNorthAmerica.com Call (800) 528-4633

ANCIENTG R A I N S

E X P E L L E R - P R E S S E D

OILS

PROTEINC R I S P S

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Simply put: today’s consumers want food, simply. Shop-pers are choosing products with fewer ingredients, products with fewer artificial ingredients, and prod-

ucts that are closer to the fresh foods they know. People didn’t come out of the recession penny-pinchers, but they did come out demanding more value from every product.

Correspondingly, more and more restaurants and food formulators are asking for artisan oils—those that carry the premium expeller pressed, cold pressed, or virgin label. People associate these attributes with quality, and, with more discre-tionary income in their pockets, they aren’t afraid to indulge in good value from trustworthy companies that bring passion into crafting their finished products.

Beyond the demand for a tasteful, finished oil product, there’s another driver behind the growth in the expeller pressed oil market: consumers see the brands they support as extensions of themselves. This is particularly true of the social media-savvy millennial generation (ages 19-35).

Shopping for food or visiting a favorite restaurant with friends and family is about quality nourishment, but it’s also a reflection of values. One of those values is “authenticity”—namely, reconnecting to origins, to what got us here, to what will last. One answer to that call for authenticity is the expeller press, which is deeply ingrained in America’s agricultural heri-tage. Consumers want to be a part of that.

The expeller press: an American inventionAmerica is a country where we make things, elegant things: the cotton gin, the steam engine, the tractor, and rubber tires. In 1876, an enterprising young man from Ohio saw a paper printing press at the Chicago Centennial Exposition. His name was Valerius Anderson, and 10 years later he would go

on to invent the world’s first continuous screw expeller press to extract oil from crop seeds.

The expeller press was incredibly successful: in the early 1900s, 60 to 80 percent of the soybean crush was done this way. It was the most efficient method at the time, recovering up to 70 percent of the oil.

Then, in 1941, Germany invented a new method for ex-tracting oil from seeds using solvents. Solvent extraction is more efficient than expeller, yielding up to 99 percent of the oil, and can operate at higher capacities.

But like bell-bottoms and baseball season, good things come back around. The sales of expeller pressed cooking oils have jumped nearly 300 percent since 2011, according to Nielsen data. Consumers associate the expeller pressed label with premium products, and there’s a high correlation be-tween expeller pressed oils and oils that are also labeled non-GMO. With discretionary spending on the rise, consumers are demanding premium products—like expeller pressed oils and oil ingredients—and are increasingly able to pay for them.

Expeller pressed oil todayConsumers who buy expeller pressed oils appreciate coming home with a product that’s more gently processed, and one that may retain more of the delicate flavor and fatty acids of the original oilseeds. Over half of today’s consumers pay close attention to the ingredients used in the products they buy, ac-cording to Dataline, and with a world of information at their fingertips, they know more about food ingredients and manu-facturing than at any time in history.

Livestock farmers have also been enjoying the benefits of expeller press methods: the meal left behind after the oilseeds are pressed has a higher fat and protein content and is highly

the Elegance of Expeller PressedFood manufacturers heed the call for ‘authentic’ artisan oils.By Bunge

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desired for the cow-calf and similar feed markets. Sunflower meal after mechanical pressing has a fat content of 13 per-cent—versus after-solvent extraction, where it may have fat content of only 1 percent, according to the National Sun-flower Association.

Whole Harvest was the first company to offer an expel-ler pressed line of culinary oils for commercial applications (wholeharvest.com), and they were recently acquired by Bunge. “We see more of our customers asking for the expel-ler pressed label or looking for minimally processed oils,” says Brian Anderson of Bunge. “So we’re really pleased to expand our capacity to provide expeller pressed oils and, in turn, to bring our expertise and extensive network and logistics capac-ity to Whole Harvest products.”

Whole Harvest oils are already used in many quality food applications and, like other Bunge oils, have a reputation for a long fry life and great texture and taste.

The Whole Harvest line includes expeller pressed frying oils, pan sprays, and liquid butter alternatives that are free from artificial preservatives. They’re also free from cholesterol and trans fats and offer non-GMO cooking oil and pan coat-ing options. With a range of oilseeds—canola, cottonseed, and soy—Whole Harvest speaks to a wide range of customer needs and preferences.

The Whole Harvest line extends the virgin, cold-pressed soybean, sunflower, and canola oils Bunge has already been of-fering to U.S. restaurants through a partnership with Pristine Gourmet (virginoils.com), which is operated by fourth-genera-tion Canadian farmer Jason Persall. All of Persall’s extra virgin oils are cold-pressed, heat-free, preservative- and additive-free, and pressed from #1 grade quality seeds.

By adding new oils and ingredients to Bunge’s portfolio, food brands have additional options to support the growth of their business with the exceptional flavors, performance, and customizable features they’ve come to expect from Bunge.

Premium products rely on premium ingredientsIt’s no coincidence that the expeller press market is expand-ing at the same time as more and more companies are bring-ing transparency to all the ingredients they use, from where they’re grown to how they’re processed to how they reach peo-ple’s tables. In using expeller pressed oil, a company conveys

its willingness to apply an even more critical eye toward the detailed steps that go into crafting quality foods.

At Bunge, we recently renewed our commitments to nour-ishing a growing population in a way that’s sustainable for people and for ecosystems (bunge.com/citizenship). We’ve al-ways been proud of who we are as a company, and we’re excited to be able to share our culture, our practices, and most impor-tantly our food ingredients with our customers.

Visit BungeOilExperts.com to learn more about expeller pressed oils from the oil experts at Bunge.

OIL EXTRACTION METHODS: BUNGE OIL EXPERTS EXPLAIN• Solvent Extraction: oil heated to high temper-

ature (400°F or higher) and extracted with a solvent; recovers about 99 percent of the oil.

• Expeller Press: Heavy pressure is continuously applied to seeds by tightening screw, until oil seeps out; recovers about 65-70 percent of oil (also called Screw Press or Mechanical Press).

• Cold Press: oil kept at low temperature during mechanical extraction; in Europe, regulated to be below 80-120°F, depending on source.

• virgin and Extra virgin: Cold-pressed and from the first pressing (hence the name “virgin”); extra virgin olive oil has 1% acid, virgin olive oil has 3% and is less sensitive to heat.

• Refined oil: oil is heated and more thoroughly processed to remove additional resins, pig-ments, gums, waxes, and/or odors; more stable for storage and good choice for high- heat cooking.

• Unrefined oil: oil is only lightly filtered; retains more flavor, is highly sensitive to heat, and has limited shelf life.

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Sweet Assurance

Visit ci�ngredients.com/health, call 252-462-1551, or email sales@ci�1.com

to learn more about how our domestic sweet potato ingredients can support healthy,

marketable applications.

Consumers need to trust their food to be healthy. The industry needs ingredients it can rely on. North Carolina sweet potato ingredients from CIFI meet both demands, supporting functional formulas with a diverse range of juices and dehydrated products.

PERCEIVE SWEET POTATOES95%

AS A HEALTHY FOOD

6 OUT OF 10 CONSUMERS SEESWEET POTATO JUICE AS HEALTHIER THAN LEADING FRUIT BASED SWEETENERS

MORE THAN

HALFOF THE INDUSTRY WOULD USESWEET POTATOINGREDIENTS TO ADD NUTRITIONALOR FUNCTIONAL VALUETO AN APPLICATION

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67% OF CONSUMERS WOULD PAY MORE FOR

PRODUCTS CONTAININGSWEET POTATOINGREDIENTS

THE FUNCTIONAL, FLEXIBLE

Sweet Potato

IN NUTRITION

SWEET POTATOES RANK NUMBER ONE IN NUTRITION OF ALL

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Many consumers demand healthy, functional foods and food ingredients these days, looking to their food products to deliver more than basic calories.

The attached article from the Plants for Human Health Insti-tute at North Carolina State University describes how phyto-chemicals contained in orange and purple sweet potato ingre-dients can contribute wellness benefits to human diets.

Sweet potato ingredients, depending on the variety of sweet potato employed, contain various phytochemicals that are strong antioxidants. These help with scavenging free radicals and providing anti-inflammatory properties in the body when consumed in a food product. Our sweet potato ingredients contain some of these phytochemicals and can add important functional properties to your food products.

Taking Sweet Potatoes Beyond the Thanksgiving FeastThe article describes tests conducted on sweet potato flour and sweet potato juice concentrate, showing that sweet potato ingredients are good sources of phytochemicals. Testing also shows that sweet potato ingredients help stabilize and enhance the phytochemicals in other food ingredients in blends. Fi-nally, sensory evaluations found that sweet potato flours can contribute to appealing applications including baked goods, smoothies, and cereals. Like many other holiday foods, sweet potatoes are available year-round, but mysteriously reserved for seasonal feasts on most American tables. As fall approach-es, the color palette of magazine spreads change from bright summer hues to mostly orange, burgundy, deep purple and

golden yellow. Mouth-watering photos of sweet potato dishes fill the pages reserved for recipe inspiration; and often, in the corner of the page, is a box of small text, maybe a bulleted list, that reminds the reader that sweet potato is a superfood, full of nutrition and wellness benefits.

Perhaps, this is the very reason sweet potatoes are not a reg-ular part of the menu. Once the holidays are over, the recipes are filed away and our attention moves on to the New Year and setting goals for better health. Wait. Better health? Time to put sweet potatoes back on the grocery list.

Researchers at N.C. State University’s Plants for Human Health Institute (PHHI), Kannapolis, NC, recently published results of their work evaluating the phytochemical content of sweet potatoes. The research looked at concentrations of phy-tochemicals at harvest, after periods of storage and as a func-tional food ingredient.

Most commonly, fruits and vegetables, including sweet po-tatoes, are touted for their vitamin content, low calories or, perhaps, high fiber. Phytochemicals are different from all of those nutritional attributes. Phytochemicals have long been recognized as naturally occurring chemical compounds in plants that protect the plant from disease or cellular stress. An emerging body of research is leading to a better understanding of how phytochemicals are biologically active in the human body, conferring disease-preventing properties.

The phytochemical profile of sweet potatoes includes phe-nolic acids, carotenoids and anthocyanins. The amount of each of these is dependent on the variety of sweet potato with flesh

Enhancing antioxidants: Sweet Potato Ingredientsa closer look at the benefits of phytochemicals and the promise of functional food ingredientsBy CIFI and the NC State University Plants for Human Health Institute

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color being a determining factor. While orange varieties are, by far, the most prevalent available in the United States, sweet potato varieties can vary in their flesh tone, from a carotenoid-rich deep orange to a pale yellow and, for a major boost in anthocyanins, there are also purple-flesh varieties.

Fighting Disease with PhytochemicalsDr. Mary Ann Lila, director of the Plants for Human Health Institute, explains, “Bioactive phytochemicals, or ‘phytoac-tives,’ are natural compounds that accumulate inside an edible plant. When a fruit or vegetable is eaten, these natural com-pounds protect our cells against the ravages of free radicals and provide anti-inflammatory benefits that help to attenuate human disease incidence and progression.” Dr. Lila has stud-ied phytoactives in many fruit and vegetable crops, including blueberry, black currant, muscadine grapes, kale and sweet potato. Three classes of phytochemicals found in sweet potato have been extensively evaluated by Dr. Lila’s lab.◆◆ Phenolic acids are largely credited with the antioxidant and free radical scavenging ability in the sweet potato.◆◆ Carotenoids, including beta-carotene, confer pro-vitamin A activity that prevents vitamin A deficiencies and night blindness. Beta-carotene has demonstrated antioxidant and anticancer activities and may help offer protection against coronary heart disease.◆◆ Anthocyanins, found in purple sweet potatoes, provide free radical scavenging activity, memory-enhancing effects and protective effects for the liver. Anthocyanins help to cleanse the liver of toxins, curbing inflammation.

A Functional Food IngredientDr. Mary Ann Lila, Director of the Plants for Human Health Institute, and her colleague, Dr. Mary Grace, are in-terested in the health benefits of sweet potato, but also in its applicability as a component of functional foods. Func-tional foods are food products that are given an additional health-promoting or disease-preventing function by adding a beneficial ingredient to the original food or food product. In the case of sweet potatoes, Lila’s lab looked at sweet potato juice concentrate and sweet potato flour for beneficial health properties. The research included a sensory analysis that led to suggestions for several functional food applications that

may add the health benefits of sweet potato phytochemicals to other foods.

Lila’s research methods include using a proprietary, novel process that produces stable, dry, powdered ingredient matri-ces. For example, a protein-rich flour (e.g., soy, hemp or pea-nut) can be enriched in the lab with concentrated phytochemi-cals, such as fruit polyphenols. Exploring the possibilities for sweet potato functional ingredients, the Lila lab approached the research from two angles: 1) binding fruit polyphenols to a ground, sweet potato flour, and 2) binding (purple) sweet potato polyphenols to other protein-rich flours.

Both approaches produced promising results, including sig-nificantly increased concentrations of total phenolics. Three distinct matrices of sweet potato flour bound to black currant, blueberry and muscadine grape concentrates displayed up to seven times the concentration of total phenolics compared to the original fruit juices. Similarly, the purple sweet potato juice concentrate, bound respectively to defatted soy flour, light roast peanut flour and rice protein concentrate, had at least 10 times more total phenolics. Additional testing assessed stability of the phytonutrients over time finding that polyphe-nols, as well as the vibrant color of the fortified flours, were preserved for up to 24 weeks.

Purple sweet potato juice concentrate is a dark red color. The anthocyanins (a plant pigment responsible for red, blue and purple color in fruits and vegetables) in sweet potato are present in a form that is more color stable than the form found in most fruit sources (such as blueberries or grapes). As such, the anthocyanins from purple sweet potato have significant potential as a natural food colorant for commercial food prod-ucts. In addition to replacing a synthetic food colorant, the natural food colorant could potentially introduce additional antioxidant activity to whatever food product is colored with sweet potato anthocyanins.

These innovations capture the health benefits of sweet potato in convenient, stable ingredients that can be incorporated into a wide variety of snack foods, baby foods, military rations, or even food products that stave off malnutrition in developing nations.

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