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Making the world a healthier place to eat, drink and live

TasteTrek Citrus, lemon tree
  • Solutions for the health and wellness market
  • Leading in Latin America
  • Making tea an even healthier option
  • Partnering with AkzoNobel on a world first
Solutions for the health and wellness market
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One of the most significant developments over the past decade for Givaudan is our move into providing solutions for the health and wellness market. It is so important to us, in fact, that we have made health and wellness one of our five strategic pillars for growth.

What may have begun as a trend is very much a market reality today, both in developed and emerging markets. Givaudan is active across all our regions, helping to fill the void and recreate the taste, in products where less sugar, fat, salt and MSG have become obligatory.

Health and wellness is a huge topic, covering people’s mental and physical well-being. A major cause of heath and wellness issues, however, is clear: dietary concerns in an age of plentiful foods rich in salt, fat and sugar. This has long been recognised in the West. It is now increasingly identified as a problem elsewhere in the world, including Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

For Givaudan, and our customers, this presents huge challenges and exceptional opportunities. With our flavours we address the demand for food and beverages to not only taste good, but also to contribute to better health. We do this through lessening the impacts of sugar, fat, salt and MSG in products, predominantly with our TasteSolutions® programme.

Leading in Latin America
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Leading in Latin America

Givaudan’s TasteSolutions® programme enables our customers to achieve superior taste performance in their brands and products. TasteSolutions® is a broad platform, with offerings in salt, sweetness, umami and mouthfeel. Givaudan delivers healthier options in these areas, utilising the industry’s most comprehensive taste ingredient palette.

The TasteSolutions® programme has given us a leadership position in taste research in Latin America. Our customers recognise that we have a ‘unique taste solution’, which provides quality assurance and confidence in healthy products development.

Over the last few years, Givaudan has hosted TasteSolutions® seminars in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, where health and wellness issues are now at the top of the agenda for these governments. Diseases related to poor diet have increased dramatically in the last decade across Latin America, leading to regulations that legislate for greater transparency and reductions in fat, salt and sugar. Not only do our customers want to innovate, they are also being forced to act.

Givaudan’s theme for the seminar programme addressed the evolution of non-communicable chronic diseases and their local impact. We partnered with the health industry in each country, engaging renowned doctors and experts. Central to the discussion was how we can help to change one of the most important consumer barriers to healthier products, which is the perception of ‘low taste’ in reduced fat, salt and sugar products.

Making tea an even healthier option
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Making tea an even healthier option

In North America, ready-to-drink teas are gaining in popularity, partly in response to busy lifestyles, but also as an alternative to sugar-rich carbonated drinks. Tea already comes with a very positive consumer perception as a natural health drink, rich in antioxidants that can help to protect the body against disease.

With TasteSolutions® for Reduced Calorie Teas customers can now develop products across the spectrum of consumer demand, with low calorie, mid-calorie and naturally sweetened teas that all focus on healthier lifestyle choices. We showcase our reduced calorie prototypes with and without TasteSolutions® natural flavours so that customers can see the benefits our solution brings.

TasteSolutions® for Reduced Calorie Teas

As is often the case with any product with a health and wellness slant, consumers want reduced sugar teas, but they will not accept a poor taste experience. That’s where we gain advantage, because our TasteSolutions® tools can deliver true sweetness perception and delicious tastes with natural ingredients.

Partnering with AkzoNobel on a world first
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Partnering with AkzoNobel on a world first

AkzoNobel Salt Specialties is the world’s leading vacuum salt producer. In 2013, the company partnered with Givaudan in a unique collaboration to address the challenges of sodium reduction for processed meat. The resulting one-to-one salt replacer, Suprasel® OneGrain® TS-M100, looks, tastes, flows, blends and dissolves in the same way as regular salt.

Givaudan looks at how the food industry uses salt, which is not to make food taste ‘salty’, but rather to enhance the flavouring: something that salt does exceptionally well. For health reasons though high levels of sodium in foods are now less acceptable.

We work with our customers to see how we can drive consumer preference in low sodium applications. The challenge is for a product to still taste recognisable and desirable, even when we’ve taken away one of the main key pillars of taste.

Using AkzoNobel’s OneGrain® technology, the new product combines salt, potassium chloride and Givaudan flavouring in every single grain, ensuring the same processing and storage properties as regular salt. Universally applicable across a broad range of processed meat products, it can help manufacturers reduce sodium content by up to 40%.

It’s a first for a flavours company to be partnering with a salt company, because normally two such entities might be regarded as operating at opposite ends of the spectrum on this issue. However, AkzoNobel chose us to help develop an entirely new generation of sodium reduction systems.

Matching Givaudan’s flavour expertise with AkzoNobel’s salt delivery technology has created a product that brings additional performance benefits to the processed meat industry. The combination of our technologies is applicable to many other areas of the food industry where taste, functionality and handling are key considerations when reducing sodium levels.